LIBIDINAL ENGINEERS:
THREE STUDIES IN CYBERNETICS AND ITS DISCONTENTS
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ART & ART HISTORY
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
KENNETH ALLAN WHITE JR
JUNE 2015
© 2015 by Kenneth Allan White, Jr. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/vg298hc6828
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Pavle Levi, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Fred Turner, Co-Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Bryan Wolf
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Nora Alter
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii Abstract
Libidinal Engineers offers a cultural history of automatic control in North American avant-garde media cultures of the Cold War. It tells the story of how three artists worked through the implications of Cold War “closed world” discourses of control and communication, their disastrous application in the “technowar” in Vietnam, and in the lived condition of “control societies.” The dissertation follows this trajectory by means of three dilating rings: from instruments to delimited environments to lived conditions. First,
I examine an instrument of automatic control, the Camera Activating Machine in Michael
Snow’s now-canonical La région centrale (1971) and its heretofore unknown relation to discourses of Cold War surveillance, in particular technologies of the Early Warning Line and anxieties of representation. Second, I address a delimited environment of multimedia assemblage, Carolee Schneemann’s Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room (1970), and how it appropriated both the discourse and devices of automatic control, such as human intrusion detectors, as a means to foreground issues of sexuality and gender immanent to media cultures of the Vietnam War. Finally, I introduce an examination of the lived conditions of technocratic determination, formulated in Tom Sherman’s performance Hyperventilation (1970) and his construction of the part-instruments, part- sculptures Orgone Energy Accumulator (1972) and Faraday Cage (1972), where
Sherman explores the darker side of American counterculture’s techno-utopia and the coextensive character of control and communication on terms of not only cybernetics but a longer history of discourses of mind control.
iv | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Based in new, in-depth archival research, I examine the interrelation of technologies and discourses of national defense and artistic experiments in film, video, and multimedia design. Emphasis is placed on terms of desire and affect. I focus especially on cybernetics, defined as “control and communication in the human and machine,” a discourse originating in the defense industries of World War II and scientific research in fields of physics, mathematics, and engineering. Drawing upon primary sources such as patent records, declassified wartime reports, and operating manuals, I assert artists’ engagement with the mechanical basis of cybernetics in mechanical and electrical engineering, insisting upon a necessary shift from the prevailing focus upon metaphors of feedback to the hardware by which feedback was materially constituted: servomechanisms, the technology of automatic control.
.
v | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to the artists, writers, and engineers who gave so much of their time and attention in our conversations: Pierre Abbeloos, Jan Pottie,
Carolee Schneemann, Tom Sherman, and Michael Snow.
My thanks to the archivists who provided invaluable assistance to my research:
Marilyn Nazar, Rosamund Ivey Special Collections Archivist at the Edward P. Taylor
Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario; Ilona Lütken, Archive Administrator,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Peter Blank, Head Librarian, and Anna Fishaut, Assistant
Librarian, Stanford University Art & Architecture Library; Robert G. Trujillo, Head of
Special Collections & Frances and Charles Field Curator of Special Collections, and
Mattie Taormina, Head of Public Services and Processing Manuscript Librarian,
Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University
Libraries; and Robert A. Haller, Librarian and Director of Special Projects, Anthology
Film Archives.
I am grateful for the direction and support provided by my advisors throughout development of this work: Pavle Levi, Fred Turner, Bryan Wolf, and Nora M. Alter. My thanks to Adrian Daub for his participation in the final stage of the dissertation process.
My graduate studies were made possible by Dr. Leslie P. Hume and Mr. George
H. Hume through a 2008-2013 Stanford University Hume Graduate Fellowship in the
Arts. I am honored to receive their generous support. Further support was provided by a
2013-2014 Mellon Foundation Fellowship through the Stanford Humanities Center. My
vi | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 final research benefitted from a Stanford University Graduate Research Opportunity
Grant.
This dissertation began in papers composed for seminars at Stanford. Core components of my dissertation argument were generated for Photograph, Document,
Archive directed by Maria Gough in Autumn 2008 and for Psychoanalytic Hermeneutics:
Soma, Psyche, and Self in Modernist Discourse directed by Hayden White in Spring
2009. Portions of “Strangeloves” and “Tom Sherman and the Influencing Machines” have their basis in research conducted for Media Cultures of the Cold War directed by Pamela
M. Lee and Fred Turner in Spring 2009. The principal claims of “Strangeloves” originate in my work for North American Postwar Avant-Garde Cinema directed by Pavle Levi in
Autumn 2010. Parts of “Meat System in Köln” were composed in Imprisonment and the
Dramatic Imagination: Censorship Reconsidered directed by Peggy Phelan in Spring
2011. “Tom Sherman and the Influencing Machines” was first developed in Computing and American Culture, 1945–Present directed by Fred Turner in Spring 2011. My work was further honed in courses directed by Thomas Beischer, Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, and
Bryan Wolf.
I am grateful for the honor of participation in the Whitney Museum of America
Art Independent Study Program, as a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Critical Studies in
2013–2014, and in Studio in 2014–2015. My thanks to Ron Clark for granting this invaluable and deeply formative experience. I would like to thank Alexander Alberro for his guidance at crucial points in my writing, and for his encouragement throughout. My
vii | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 appreciations especially to Nora M. Alter for her advisement of the chapter “Meat System in Köln” under the auspices of the ISP.
I am also grateful to the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und
Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar. The 2013 Princeton-Weimar
Summer School for Media Studies, under the direction of Bernhard Siegert and Thomas
Y. Levin, has had far-reaching impact across my work. My participation in the 2012 conference Cinematographic Objects II: Things and Operations was formative to
“Strangeloves.” I am appreciative for these opportunities, and for my colleagues in the experience. I would like to thank Lorenz Engell, Christoph Engemann, Olga Moskatova,
Jeffrey Kirkwood, and Volker Patenburg.
Portions of this dissertation were previously published. Excerpts of Chapter Two were published as “Strangeloves: From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station
Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War” in Grey Room 58 (Winter 2015) and in the book Cinematographic Objects: Things and Operations published by August Verlag,
Berlin (2015). Portions of Chapter Three were published as “Focus on Carolee
Schneemann: Introduction” in Millennium Film Journal 54 (Summer/Autumn 2011), as
“Terminal Velocities” in San Francisco Art Quarterly 10 (Winter 2012-13), and as “Meat
System in Cologne” in Art Journal 74, no. 1 (Spring 2015). Portions of Chapter Four were published as “Until You Get to Know Me: Tony Oursler’s Aetiology of Television” in Millennium Film Journal 47 (Spring 2013) and as “Absolute Feedback: Notes on the
Discursive Spaces of Video Art circa 1976” in San Francisco Arts Quarterly 13 (May-
July 2013). I have benefitted from the editorial process at each of these organizations. I
viii | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 would like to thank my editors Eric C.H. de Bruyn, Noam M. Elcott, Joe Hannan,
Andrew McClintock, Volker Patenburg, Lane Relyea, Jonathan Thomas, and Grahame
Weinbren.
Exceptional generosity was given to me by Paule Anglim and Ed Gilbert of
Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Wendy Osloff, Penny Pilkington, and Anneliis
Beadnell of PPOW Gallery, New York; and John Mhiripiri, Robert Haller, Wendy
Dorsett, and Andrew Lampert of Anthology Film Archives.
I have been honored by the friendship of Andy Archer, Peter Blank, Emil Caigan,
Alison Carmichael, Brian Carmichael, Iliana Cepero-Amador, Una Chung, Margaret Liu
Clinton, Rebecca Duclos, Kathryn Elder, R. Bruce Elder, Dan Hackbarth, Tara Hart,
Kiersten Jakobsen, Russell Ganzi, Leo Koenig, Hsinyi Tiffany Lee, Katie Keller, James
Nisbet, Sebastian Salvado, Phaedon Sinis, Tanya Sleiman, David K. Ross, Amber Ruiz,
Judy Staples and Brewster Staples, Tess Takahashi, Huey-Ning Tan, Jeannine Tang, Roy
Viado, Jill Westbrook (Davis), and Michael Zryd.
My family has made this all possible, more than they know, more than my words might offer, and for which I will continue to seek the means to express. I write for my mother Althaea White, my father Ken White, abeonim Chulsoo Yoon and eomeonim
Eunha Park, Sojin Yoon, Chi Cheung, and Henry Cheung. Soyoung Yoon, you are my reader; I am honored to be yours. I am thrilled by what we can make together. To the future, my love.
ix | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Table of Contents
Title Page i Copyright Page ii Signature Page iii Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi
1. 1 Introduction
2. 37 Strangeloves: From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War
3. 97 Meat System in Köln: Carolee Schneemann and the Electronic Activation Room
4. 138 Tom Sherman and the Influencing Machines
5. 194 Conclusion
Bibliography 199 Illustration Checklist 245
x | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 1.
Introduction
“That fall [1967], all that the Mission talked about was control: arms control, information control, resources control, psycho- political control, population control, control of the almost supernatural inflation, control of terrain through the Strategy of the Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thing left standing up that looked true was your sense of how out of control things really were. Year after year, season after season, wet and dry, using up options faster than rounds on a machine- gun belt, we called it right and righteous, viable and even almost won, and it still only went on the way it went on. When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, ‘sorry’ just won’t cover it. There’s nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in war.”
– Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977)1
1. To Envision a Nightmare
On March 17th, 1945, Warren Weaver wrote, “The last ten years have seen a tremendous advance in the automatic control art; and the story of this advance is essentially a story of the modern servomechanism.”2 With these words, Weaver began his foreword to the 1945 mass-market publication of the book Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms by LeRoy
MacColl, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. The book began as a classified wartime report for circulation in the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and
1 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1977), 48.
2 Warren Weaver, foreword to LeRoy MacColl, Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms (New York: D. van Nostrand Company, 1945), vii.
1 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 its associated divisions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Bell Labs.
At that time, Weaver was the Chief of the Applied Mathematics Panel (AMP) of the
NDRC and Section Chief of Fire Control Analysis in the Fire Control Division of the
NDRC, the famed Division 7. Weaver was based in New York City, where, as director of the Rockefeller Foundation, he was a key interlocutor between operations research laboratories of area academic institutions such as Columbia and Princeton, the scientists of Bell Labs, leadership in the American armed forces, and the Roosevelt Administration.
Weaver continued his foreword:
“The last ten years have seen a tremendous advance in the automatic control art; and the story of this advance is essentially a story of the modern servomechanism. The control art is an old one. With the broadest definition, it is a very ancient art; for one supposes that if Adam wished to control Eve’s vocal output, he had simple mechanisms, such as a well-balanced club, with which he doubtless brought it down a goodly number of decibels. One of the first control devices of general and important application was the centrifugal governor which James Watt invented, about 1790, to control the speed of his steam engine.”3
Weaver’s words are telling. He presents casual misogynistic humor wrapped in more than a little victor’s pride. Weaver illustrates the physics of servomechanisms— defined broadly as effective coordination of force in the service of a predetermined purpose—through a fantasy of prehistorical domestic assault. He articulates an especially brazen expression of gendered violence from within the rarified military operations research environments of Bell Labs and the NDRC. The spontaneity of Weaver’s
3 Weaver, foreword, vii.
2 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 chauvinism belies more generalized anxieties set into discourses of technological development. The primary subject at hand, however, is the applicability of servo engineering to postwar sciences of control and communication. Weaver’s scenario, with its brutish, prelapsarian flourish, indicates the tone in which these rhetorics of automatic control circulated. In the critical context of total war, the servo is imagined as a pinnacle solution to a wide array of management problems. “Simple mechanisms,” perhaps, but
Weaver’s words suggest some of the fraught nature of the environment compelling the search for a device of “general and important application.” In the flippant brutality of his sexism, we gain a particular view to the pressures propelling the declared aspirations for servomechanisms. The culture which gave rise to the Fundamental Theory of
Servomechanisms was shot through with psychosexual disquiet.
“Pregnancy is barbaric,” declared Shulamith Firestone in the final chapter of her radical feminist polemic The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published in 1970.4 For Firestone, automatic control presented an opportunity to eradicate
“the tyranny of reproduction.”5 Firestone theorized through cybernetics—the new science of human-machine relations derived from theories of automatic control described by
Weaver—the implications of in vitro fertilization, and anticipated parthenogenesis (virgin birth), asserting the possibility for medical technologies to decouple reproduction from women, and thereby remove the biological inequality that determined their social inequality. Childbirth would be “indulged in, if at all, only as a tongue-in-cheek
4 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 180. Emphasis in original.
5 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 185.
3 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 archaism.”6 Childrearing would become a collective process, its burdens no longer disproportionately borne by women, but rather shared through a social formation undetermined by genetic relation. Supported by cybernetic automation, this unit would be constituted for the immediate needs of the child only, then disbanded or recomposed.
Surely, Firestone admitted, “to envision it [cybernetics] in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare.”7 Yet, machines could act as the “perfect equalizer, obliterating the class system based on exploitation of labor.”8 Cybernetics held out the possibility of rendering the nuclear family irrelevant. “Family chauvinism, class privilege based on birth, would wither away.”9 For Firestone, cybernetics was a means to fulfilling the necessary advancement of historical materialism, especially on terms of women’s psychosexual liberation. Automatic control would herald unprecedented self- determination and collective responsibility. “Cybernetic communism” was at hand.10
Weaver and Firestone: two figures whose uses for automatic control are profoundly antagonistic, arising in starkly distinctive moments and contexts, yet they share an acclaim for its revolutionary potential. On the one hand, Weaver writes in 1945 from the center of the American academic-military-industrial infrastructure to congratulate the supremacy—and prehistorical mandate—of his colleagues’ technological innovations. Firestone in 1970, on the other hand, writing from the social periphery in the
6 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 216.
7 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 182.
8 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 183.
9 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 216.
10 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 213.
4 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 nascent second wave women’s movement, crystallizes a furious polemic against those institutions from which automatic control emerged. Each presents irreconcilable purposes to which automatic control was applied, yet their missions are not in contradiction.
Weaver and Firestone assert a commitment to the control of the “nature” of woman: in the former, submission by force; in the latter, liberation from the biological and social burdens of reproduction. From a generation across the Cold War, Weaver’s cruel self- satisfaction finds a poignant counterpart in Firestone’s yearning for the “perfect equalizer.”
As we shall see throughout this dissertation, rhetorics of “control and communication” were employed, darkly, for the elimination of chaos, errancy, and
“noise” broadly defined to include a range of social “problems.” We will find that
Weaver’s joke is not a regrettable, colorful aside, and Firestone’s prophesies are not mere metaphorical extrapolation. Rather, they belie the complex, entrenched power structures providing the rarified conditions of possibility by which cyberneticians could propose an analogical relation between animal and machine. Noise was instrumentalized to the purposes of well-fortified prejudices, the central claim of cybernetics made possible by a culture of stark inequality. Weaver’s Edenic joke displays an astringent clarity in his understanding of the social implications of automatic control, a brutal rhetorical telescoping to its essence, matched by Firestone’s militant refusal of given conditions of structural inequity on terms of reproductive labor. Through Weaver’s and Firestone’s evocation of discontents on acute terms of gender, sexuality, and the nuclear family, we come to a view of how automatic control circulated as a device and as a discursive figure.
5 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 2. Modalities of Control
Libidinal Engineers tells the story of how three North American artists worked through the implications of automatic control as manifested in Cold War “closed world” discourses of control and communication, their disastrous application in the “technowar” in Vietnam, and in diffuse conditions of “control societies.” The organization of the dissertation follows this trajectory in the form of three dilating rings, moving through case studies of, first, a discrete apparatus of automatic control technology in the case of the Camera Activating Machine conceived by Michael Snow and created by Pierre
Abbeloos, then to a delimited environment of multimedia assemblage in the case of
Carolee Schneemann’s Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room (1970), and finally to the lived conditions of technocratic determination in the case of Tom Sherman and his work such as Hyperventilation (1970). In proposing a cultural history of automatic control technology through the art of Snow, Schneemann, and Sherman, this dissertation aims to contribute to a considerable existing scholarship on human-machine relations in the 1960s and ‘70s. Foremost among those studies, for the purposes of this account, is
Anson Rabinbach’s The Human Motor. In his magisterial work, Rabinbach explicates the rise of the “human motor” as a metaphor for human-machine relations in the late nineteenth century, in conjunction with the Second Industrial Revolution, the
Technological Revolution. According to Rabinbach, the metaphor marks a critical turn in the imagination of the human body not as machine but motor—a turn that had profound economic and cultural effects. Whereas “the machine was capable of work only when
6 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 powered by some external source,” the motor “was regulated by internal, dynamic principles, converting fuel into heat, and heat into mechanical work.” In nineteenth century discourses of labor, “the body, the steam engine, and the cosmos were thus connected by a single and unbroken chain of energy.”11 This vision of the body within a vast network of biological-technical relations would serve artists in the 1960s and 1970s in their own particular commitments to disrupting the devastating purposes to which this
“chain of energy” was directed in their own time. By charting automatic control as an object and an idea—an actual device and a conceptual generator—in the work of Snow,
Schneemann, and Sherman, I will explicate a selection of the material foundations of postwar models of control and communication.
Each artist used automatic control technology as material supports in their modes of production. Each built servo systems in film and video works, staged encounters with servomechanisms as content of their art, or understood their own body as a kind of biological servo system in dynamic relation to networks of other servomechanisms. Each also called upon the rhetoric of servo systems to diagnose their lived conditions in Cold
War culture. They utilized the new computational and administrative apparatuses to both give form to and resist a variety of ideological directives to which those apparatuses were officially devoted. In their work, the historical character of automatic control was brought to bear upon, to follow Weaver’s words, its “general and important application.” Like
Weaver, these three artists imagined scenarios of a postwar culture conceived through the logic of servo-mechanics. But radical ambivalence, not unquestionable certainty,
11 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 52.
7 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 determined their scenarios. Automatic control, in the form of structures of instruments of war and administrative power, seemed to churn alarmingly beyond any relation to the will of their supposed constituents. In response to such a climate, Snow, Schneemann, and Sherman built servo systems of their own, or imagined themselves as instruments of automatic control, that might redirect the dynamic forces of their cultures.
The servomechanism may be understood as a kind of “missing object” in discourses which relate film, video, body art, and performance to cybernetics. In art history, cybernetics has been utilized rhetorically in particular through isolation of the term “feedback” so as to analyze relations between the counterculture and mainstream culture in the context of social, political, and economic upheavals of the 1960s and
1970s. This relies on a vernacular form of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener himself actively encouraged such extrapolation of his work far beyond its wartime contexts. The metaphorical application of feedback has, however, diminished the insight that may be derived from consideration of the specific conditions of its development. In the chapters that follow, I assert artists’ engagement with the mechanical basis of cybernetics, giving particular attention to the foundations of cybernetics in weapons research conducted in the fields of physics, mathematics, and engineering in the 1940s. My analyses draw upon close investigation of primary sources such as patent records, declassified wartime reports, and operating manuals generated by the NDRC and MIT Radiation Laboratory. I will follow the lead of the historian of engineering David A. Mindell who has indicated that origins of cybernetics may be situated earlier than the mid-1940s. Wiener claimed in his memoir, “I think I can claim credit for transferring the whole theory of the
8 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 servomechanism bodily to communication engineering”—but, as Mindell notes, Wiener
“never explained what he meant by ‘bodily.’”12 Under the rubric of “control systems,”
Mindell charts the complex interrelation of human-machine interfaces. “Systems are things as well as ideas,” notes Mindell.13 It will be the mission of this dissertation to explicate some meanings of that “bodily” transfer as articulated by artists in the Cold War period. The notion of feedback was, then, contingent upon specific developments in mechanical engineering, and devices which could facilitate the kind of transmission and reception of signals they proposed. To produce the type of discourse they sought, it was necessary to call upon particular strains of experimental hardware: for Snow, Sherman, and Schneemann, before feedback might be imagined, there was the required working through of automatic control, its progeny cybernetics, and its discontents.
3. Control Systems
In defining cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and Weaver’s subordinate in the NDRC, presented a theory of “control and communication in the animal and machine” premised on a direct analogy between human physiology and the responsive capacities of a machine, based in part in wartime mechanical and electrical engineering, including MacColl’s Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms.14 Wiener wrote: “The
12 David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4.
13 Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 5.
14 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948). See Wiener’s discussion of MacColl’s theory of servomechanisms in Cybernetics, 7 and 19.
9 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 synapse is nothing but a mechanism for determining whether a certain combination of outputs from other selected elements will or will not act as adequate stimulus for the discharge of the next element, and must have its precise analogue in the computing machine.”15 Underscoring his metaphor, Wiener argued that a “modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system to an apparatus for automatic control.”16 This computer-servo assemblage followed from Wiener’s wartime work on the antiaircraft predictor, a system by which the trajectory of an enemy aircraft could be calculated and responsive fire accurately arrayed against the target’s position.
While the antiaircraft predictor itself did not work, to Wiener it proved a rich model for the prediction—and control—of future behavior of a subject. As Peter Galison observes, in Wiener’s vision, “servomechanical theory would become the measure of man.”17
The enemy as the cybernetic Other was understood in relation to his weapon,
“merged with machinery”: “In fighting the cybernetic enemy, Wiener and his team began to conceive of the Allied antiaircraft operators as resembling the foe, and it was a short step from this elision of the human and the nonhuman in the ally to a blurring of the human-machine boundary in general.”18 The enemy pilot and the antiaircraft gunner were thought of in an intimate, indeed mutually constitutive, relationship: “Our understanding
15 Wiener, Cybernetics, 14.
16 Wiener, Cybernetics, 26.
17 Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 240.
18 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 233.
10 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 of the cybernetic Enemy Other becomes the basis on which we understand ourselves.”19
In this way, identity was equated with a capacity for calculation and coordination: the pilot and his plane, defined by their evasive maneuvers against the antiaircraft gunner below, in turn defined by his coordination of responsive fire into the pilot’s most probable future position. Warfare was no longer framed in terms of good and evil, but rather as a problem of modulation.
Clean, cool, ruthless: a discourse of position and energy. A formal equality was granted to ally and enemy, human with machine, each drawing their defining character through a relation of violence—communication by means of firepower. “The servomechanical enemy became, in the cybernetic vision of the 1940s, the prototype for human physiology and, ultimately, for all of human nature.”20 Wiener’s human-machine analogy was contingent on a radical diminishment of the contingency of human nature.
All that could not be accounted for in the parameters of acceptable behavior fell away, unruly noise. He would concede the irrational, the unconscious, on the terms of nature as enemy combatant.21 “Nature itself became an unknowable but passive opponent.”22
Control over nature was freedom from nature. Some implications of this formulation will be discussed in Chapter Two in the case of Michael Snow’s “gigantic landscape film,” La
19 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 264-265.
20 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 233.
21 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1954) (New York: Da Capo Press, 2011), 11.
22 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 233.
11 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 région centrale, particularly the dynamic between its Camera Activating Machine and Air
Defense Radar Station Moisie.
Galison points to contemporaneous criticism of Wiener’s definition of purposefulness that brought into relief that which his theories elided: inner states less readily quantifiable such as desire, pleasure, or pain.23 Wiener strived to turn social conditions into problems for mathematical computation. Yet, as Galison argues, the
“associations of cybernetics (and the cyborg) with weapons, oppositional tactics, and the black-box conception of human nature do not simply melt away.”24 The historical conditions of cybernetics persisted, and the limitation of its dream would come to the fore in the “Technowar” in Vietnam, a cataclysm in which the computational abstraction of the enemy was not so easily deracinated, nor so easily separable from its gendered character.25
The problem of Wiener’s human-machine analogy was not abstraction per se, but rather that it could never be abstract enough. To recall Weaver’s analogy of Adam’s club, its dark humor was predicated on his reader’s knowledge that such violence was all too real. In formulations such as the “communicative theory of bombing”—an instrumentalization of Schelling’s aforementioned “idiom of military action” in the
Vietnam era—we find a bitter, familiar refrain.26 To know how the abstraction of the
23 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 249-252.
24 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 260.
25 James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986) (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000).
26 Gibson, The Perfect War, 369.
12 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 enemy was actually computed—through the language of kill ratios, body counts—was, to follow Firestone, to envision a nightmare. The gendered character of this nightmare will be discussed in Chapter Three, through Carolee Schneemann’s Meat System 1: Electronic
Activation Room. No TV set in one corner, stereo in another: rather an overabundance of devices, which, by means of their massed presence, imposed an affective force contradictory to their commercial intention. In the Meat System, Cold War technophilia was the condition of flesh. Automatic control was the premise by which life would be administered. In Chapter Four, we will find this dynamic engaged in the case of
Sherman’s Hyperventilation of 1970. In that work, the artist induced himself to black-out by deep breathing. He turned a method of “self-improvement” common to counter- cultural practices of meditation or yoga into one of self-harm. Sherman regimented his breathing into an unnatural rhythm, positionin himself between function and dysfunction, between control and its loss. In Sherman’s formulation, “feedback” received a kind of arch parody, mediation’s delimiting effects were overtly literalized to the point of self- extinguishment.
As we shall see, the work of Snow, Schneemann, and Sherman gives a particular view to the technocratic determination of desire in the Vietnam War era. However, their work is not merely symptomatic of their particular social conditions in the United States and Canada, increasingly suffused with civilian-class commodity forms of defense industry information technologies. Rather, through their projects in film, video, and multimedia design, we find a working-through of the social implications of the core
13 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 stakes of automatic control of energy transfer: that is, the libidinal character of engineering.
4. From Strategic Defense to Desiring Machines
Cybernetics aspired to be the binding language between humans and machines. Snow,
Schneemann, and Sherman present three prime cases of artists who took up this aspiration as a model of, and inspiration for, aesthetic experimentation. However, in producing what may be understood as works concerned with so many instances and forms of “circulation of matter and forces,” each of the three artists not only foregrounded corporeal dynamics and physiological processes, but also incorporated strongly sexualized actions and language of sexuality into their work. Their art, therefore, requires readings that are as sensitive to desire, genitality, and the imaginary, as they are to the technological and technical innovations in the execution of complex cinematic, video, and performative tasks. As Snow described his work of the early 1970s, “an intercourse about Intercourse”; or Schneemann: “The fundamental life of any material I use is concretized in that material’s gesture”; or Sherman: “If there is a lie, the camera tells it. If we cannot believe the recording mechanism, who can we trust? I ask you to believe me. I am behind you. I represent you. I am under you. I’ve got ants in my nose and my tongue is cold.”27 Snow, Sherman, and Schneemann have devoted much attention to the production of “desiring machines,” to follow the term of the philosophers Gilles
27 Michael Snow, personal communication with the author, December 12, 2012; Carolee Schneemann, “From the Notebooks” (1962-3) in Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002), 48; “A Statement from Inside the Cultural-Industrial Compound” (1981) in Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist In the Information Environment (2002), 103.
14 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and their relational definition—part corporeal, part libidinal, part cybernetic—which claims that, at its most elementary, every machine is a “system of interruptions or breaks.”28 I will argue that examples of such systems of interruptions or breaks may be found in Michael Snow’s film La région centrale, in which his custom- made camera vehicle—literally an assemblage of servomechanisms—scans the barren
Canadian tundra, very much in the manner of the Distant Early Warning Line radar system, situated just a few kilometers away from Snow’s own station; Sherman’s
Hyperventilation, in which the artist overwhelmed (“broke down”) his own circulatory system in a brutal fulfillment of a self-help strategy; and Schneemann’s Meat System in which the fine contingency of multimedia technologies is asserted in itself as a kind of atrocity exhibition, in Schneemann’s words “a place (a space) between desire and experience.” Thus, my dissertation will seek to designate and discuss these three artists on their particular terms of libidinal engineering.
The recent discourse of “cultural techniques” (Kulturtechnik) follows Rabinbach’s work, and it is to this critical framework that I turn for assistance in my proposed constellation of devices and discursive objects. The media historian Bernhard Siegert describes cultural techniques as an analytic model distinguished by focus on the processual, operational capacity of empirical objects, the chains of operations and techniques by which a constitutive force is given to a truth claim of a culture.29 Thus, in
28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1973), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 36.
29 Bernhard Siegert, “Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 48-65.
15 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the present case, my studies do not culminate in a history of the servo per se, but rather provide an account of the relation between art and technology as it pertained to the servo as one instrument and discursive figure among many selectively appropriated and adapted for the artist’s particular purposes in their social context. I draw upon archival defense industry materials so as to concretize the associations found by artists between technology and the forces of production. In this way, I follow the artists through their own specific modalities, be it through cinema, video, collage, a heat sensor, or a body-as- servo. Their work would be composed on acute terms of gendered difference.
Furthermore, this arrangement has a long history. Friedrich Kittler observes it as the defining condition of mediation. “Whereas men constituted the human being in general and the male, women played the role of absolute precondition for discourse and a facilitative function in establishing real discourses.”30 Proceeding from this fundamental dynamic of difference, “The technical simulation of both optical and acoustical processes presupposed analyses made possible by the speed of the apparatuses themselves.”31 In this way, the management of information was framed on terms of the management of women. It will be the mission of this dissertation to unpack this constitutive exclusion, this circuit of airless tautology carried by communications engineering, under particular conditions of American postwar culture.
Historian of cybernetics Jean-Pierre Dupuy has observed, the crucial—yet largely overlooked—contribution of cybernetics was a subjectless conception of mind, an
30 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1985), trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 67.
31 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, 229.
16 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 evacuation of human character as a means of affirming human agency.32 Reduced to pure behavior, personal freedom was attained in ratio to instrumentalization stripped of metaphysical attributions. Rhetorics of expansion, network agency, even the very notion of feedback, may then be seen as abreactions to the dismantling of their conditions of possibility. The conception of technologically amplified communication arises in a scene where discourse is foreclosed, and yet, as Freud teaches us, this is not a new problem.
“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him an they still give him much trouble at times.”33 To ascertain a clear view to the “discontents” of control systems in Cold War culture, it will be necessary to historicize not only the specific artworks discussed within their contexts of production, but also the discursive models by which they may be analyzed. In this way, this dissertation will generate a shifting constellation of relations between historical, social, and material conditions during the 1960s and 1970s so to illuminate the formulation of their propulsive forces— the particular technical-libidinal character of the discontents. Thus, what follows does not hew to a consistent methodological framework, but rather strives for an adaptive explication of the structuring forces of power on the terms of desire. Libidinal Engineers aims to contribute a history of culture techniques especially on terms of sexuality and
32 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, On the Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (1994) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 107-110.
33 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), James Strachey, trans. (New York: Norton: 1989), 44.
17 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 gender: an examination of the technical-libidinal character of artists’ work in the Cold
War.
In the historical register, there are at least three “Cold Wars” at work across the chapters of this dissertation. Recent developments in Cold War studies prove crucial to understanding the range of attributions made to the term “the Cold War,” and what the implications may be for an art historical study set in that period. The work of historian of political science Anders Stephanson proves especially important on this point. Use of the term “the Cold War” as a given shorthand of periodization, perhaps implying a date range between 1945 and 1989, hazards a “description of something self-evident,” an
“amorphous convention” that at most is “a concept without movement.” Stephanson notes that the term was “invented by contemporaries and used from the outset, then battled over continuously by politicians and public intellectuals, in due course also by historians in the many polemics about the cause of the ‘war,’ and then used retroactively when, presumably, the obvious end had occurred. This sedimentation of meanings, this mess of political and scholarly controversies, demands some account if the inquiry is to earn its critical credentials.”34 It will be the mission of this dissertation to specify the particular “Cold Wars” at work in the historical context out of which each artwork arises.
Important to note here is my choice to capitalize “Cold War.” Stephanson, following the direction of art historian Craig Owens, asserts the lower case form for the noun.35
34 Anders Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 23.
35 Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” 45, n. 1.
18 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 However, in seeking to refer to the specific contest between American and Soviet powers of this period, as in a sense a larger object of study out which my case studies arise, I will capitalize the noun form.
Stephanson argues, “the cold war was from the outset not only a US term but a
US project.” He continues, “It began as a contingently articulated policy that eventually generated a system, static and dynamic at the same time.” This contradiction solidified in the policy of “containment,” set out in the memos of George F. Kennan yet instrumentalized beyond his original intentions. “In accordance with the universalist spirit of the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, containment was thus utterly devoid of that basic aspect of any proper strategy, namely, realistic ranking of priorities.” Along with this, was an absence of any diplomatic structures, such as agreements, settlements, compromises, constitutive of relations between states, even those in distressed conditions.
“‘The cold war’ became a matrix that made arguable, indeed imperative, a truly globalist role for the United States, a role it was to play to great advantage for quite some time. In practice, as the policymakers were perfectly aware, the universal struggle for freedom meant quite specific interests in specific places; but the globalist frame was an absolute precondition for that specificity.” Thus, “the whole point of the exercise was in fact not to engage the Soviet Union in the trenches of any war, real or imagined, but to establish
Washington’s license to act everywhere else. In short, error was productively serving ends of the greatest ambition.”36 Finally, “this system was qualitatively transformed in the
36 Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” 30.
19 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 early 1960s into something else.”37 Stephanson cites the Cuban missile crisis in
September 1962 as that point of transformation, the “cold war degree zero,” at which the
Eisenhower policy of threat of overwhelming counter-attack—mutually assured destruction (MAD)—was no longer tenable.38 What purpose would “massive retaliation” serve when, after a first strike made by whatever agent, the world would no longer exist?
In the face of imminent nuclear war, the Kennedy Administration recognized that diplomacy had to return. This system, static and dynamic, presents some of the complex, often contradictory, rhetorical ground upon which the examined artworks are set. And we find its cultural corollary in the elasticity of cybernetics and the aspiration for a coherent objectivity built to the measure of self-interest.
Historian Philip Mirowski describes a “closed world ontology,” a specifically
American Cold War metaphysics of the computer-related disciplines such as communications engineering. Following Paul Edwards, Mirowski suggests that “closed world ontologies were one transcendental common denominator that held together much of Cold War thought.”39 In proposing this apparently unified model of Cold War thought,
Mirowski belies the distinction between the historical conditions of its articulation and recent historical accounts. “The assertion of quasi-transcendental grand conceptual schemes impervious to outside comprehension was one major hallmark of the ‘closed world’ ontology, where every eventuality has been covered, every threat countered, and
37 Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” 26-27.
38 Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” 36.
39 Philip Mirowski, “A History Best Served Cold,” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70.
20 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 every unknown accounted for. In this manner, the Closed World was the master narrative of the Cold War sciences. It is noteworthy that this only becomes apparent when the Cold
War went into remission.”40 Provocatively, Mirowski argues that in our present era of intensive privatization under neoliberal policies, in which the coordination and integration of military science and private think tank culture has been utterly evacuated, the Closed World achieves a kind of retrospective minimum condition for ontology. We perceive something called “Cold War thought” for we “now operate in a regime that funds and organizes knowledge production along dramatically different lines … of globalized privatized science.”41 In this way, then, Mirowski’s argument may be seen to temper recent fashions for actor-network theory or object-oriented ontologies as in fact symptomatic of an intensified commercialization of science, the enduring processes of commodification in our information economy, and the deliberate evacuation of coherent social relations, more generally, in pursuit of self-interest in radically short-term parameters.
A crucial step in this process of historicization is consideration of discourses of strategic behavior during this period. “The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment of destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this
Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.” So declared “National Security Council Report 68: United States Objective and Program for
40 Mirowski, “A History Best Served Cold,” 70.
41 Mirowski, “A History Best Served Cold,” 72.
21 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 National Security” (NSC-68), a top-secret report produced by the Department of State on
April 14, 1950.42 The report continued, with unabated urgency: “The assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions is a defeat everywhere.”43 As the Cold War historian John
Lewis Gaddis observes, no longer could the United States afford a strategy of selective
“containment” at crucial strongpoints, most prominently Berlin. “The emphasis rather would have to be perimeter defense, with all points along the perimeter considered of equal importance.”44 NSC-68, ostensibly representing a more belligerent stance by the
Truman Administration against the Soviet Union, held implications for the definition of national identity on the terms of image.
Gaddis observes, “World order, and with it American security, had come to depend as much on perceptions of the balance of power as on what that balance actually was. And the perceptions involved were not those of statesmen customarily charged with making policy; they also reflected mass opinion, foreign as well as domestic, informed as well as uninformed, rational as well as irrational.” Gaddis continues, “Judgments based on such traditional criteria as geography, economic capacity, or military potential now had to be balanced against considerations of image, prestige, and credibility.” On the terms of official national security policy, then, was the assertion of the appearance of
42 “National Security Council Report 68: United States Objective and Program for National Security” (NSC-68), in American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, ed. Ernest R. May (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1993), 26.
43 NSC-68, 28.
44 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 89.
22 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 control, the necessity of coherent representation of force, in coordination with more conventional definitions of state power. Control necessitated enforcement on terms of influence, coercion, persuasion.
Diplomatic relations with the Soviets would be in fact eschewed for pursuit of capitulation via “perimeter defense.” This notion would require international intervention far beyond the physical borders of the nation, and by means as much on the order of a picture of control as force of arms. The ‘perimeter’ would be devised as necessary to the conditions of engagement; ‘defense’ may require an offensive ‘flexible response.’ “The effect was vastly to increase the number and variety of interests deemed relevant to national security, and to blur distinctions between them.”45 The authors of NSC-68 were proposing a permanent and total engagement. Its conclusions should be stated “simply, clearly, and in … ‘Hemingway sentences.’” It would be important to have “at least the broad proposals for action well in hand before the psychological ‘scare campaign’ is started,” stated another.46 NSC-68 was a policy without diplomacy; a top-secret report about the construction of a picture of dominance produced in the medium of military intervention.
Truman invoked this new policy and the scope of its applications in a public address on radio and television on September 1, 1950. He cited the recent invasion of the
Republic of Korea by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, supported by China, and, it was presumed, the Soviet Union. That September, as the embattled forces of South
45 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 90. Emphasis in original.
46 Record of meeting, Policy Review Group, 16 March 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, I, 197-198 and 226, cited in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 105.
23 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Korea and United Nations coalition readied to counterattack from the Pusan Perimeter,
Truman stated, “If aggression were allowed to succeed in Korea, it would be an open invitation to new acts of aggression elsewhere.”47 Out of the urgency of this conflict would arise a potent metaphor for the “perimeter defense” which encapsulated anxieties of infiltration of the perimeter of the mind. Following which “America must view the
Communist treatment of captives as but another weapon in the world-wide war for the minds of men … The battlefield of modern warfare is all inclusive. Today there are no distant front lines, remote no man’s lands, far-off rear areas. The home front is but an extension of the fighting front.”48 At once closed and total, this rhetoric would reach its apotheosis in Vietnam, where “ideology, not national interest, was at stake.”49
Also of importance to this study, and more specific to the initial conditions of production and reception from which emerged the works discussed, will be recent contributions to the history of multimedia projects of the 1960s and 1970s. Art historian
Andrew Uroskie has argued that a broader historical view is necessary so to underscore the sophisticated, contradictory, and often deliberately contrarian innovations found in
47 Harry S. Truman radio-television address, September 1, 1950, Truman Public Papers: 1950, 610, cited in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 107.
48 The Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, “POW … the fight continues after the battle …,” 31, folder Code of Conduct Program (Defense) (1), White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs: Records, 1952-1961, Special Assistant Series, Subject Series, box 2, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, cited in Matthew W. Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 51.
49 Edwards, The Closed World, 137.
24 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 expanded cinema.50 In a similar mode of historical investigation, I will argue for the necessity of situating my select cases in a longer, complex history of control system environments. The work of Snow and Schneemann were material to the key proponent of expanded cinema, Gene Youngblood, in whose eponymous book they figured prominently. Sherman, for his part and common to his generation of artists, took up
Youngblood’s book as a key work, engaging with inspiration as well as resistance.
As Uroskie argues, the etymology of “expanded” must be understood in a broader context of postwar art. That the word was common to rhetoric so diametrically opposed
—Youngblood’s “expanded cinema as expanded consciousness” on the one hand, art historian Rosalind Krauss’s “expanded field” of sculpture on the other—has been a long- standing academic curiosity, the gulf between them common knowledge yet its full implications not considered critically. “Expanded cinema” is distinguished by its inclusive character, more a catchword for technologically-aided stimulation than a rubric of consistent traits germane to a delimited number of works. To its acolytes, expanded cinema was a state of mind, more verb than category. “Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all,” Youngblood wrote in his 1970 book. “Like life it’s a process of becoming. … The intermedia network of cinema and television … now functions as nothing less that the nervous system of mankind.” However, to Annette Michelson, cinema’s fulfillment of its
“radical aspiration,” would necessitate disavowal of such multimedia experimentation.
While Michelson dismissed multimedia projects (such as Schneemann’s collaborator Ken
50 Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
25 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Dewey) as manifesting the “old dream of synesthesia” void of political acumen, such acumen would be found by contending with cinema’s social and technological variables as problems for the medium, its medium-specificity. As expanded cinema was poised to enjoy cinema’s new-found cultural legitimacy as the “Seventh Art,” it was deemed the necessary cost of admission. Indeed, as briefly described earlier, La région centrale would be celebrated by Michelson from within a specific architecture of severe determination of the Invisible Cinema built as a bulwark against expanded cinema.
Schneemann, for her part, would cloak Michelson’s identity as the “structuralist filmmaker” to whom she directed her poetic attack written on the scroll paper she famously removed from her vagina in the performative action Interior Scroll (1975).
Thus, we find a fraught constellation of motivations, experiments, and discourses at work through and contrary to expanded cinema projects of the 1960s and 1970s.
Cinema’s relevance for art history would be reinvigorated, not in Youngblood’s euphoria for a “Paleocybernetic Age,” but rather in a cool, sober brand of order adapted from structural anthropology and linguistics. In contrast to the critical support formulating structural-materialist film, expanded cinema was cast as an imprecise counterpart, dismissed as a program of bohemian naïveté from another world. By the end of the 1970s, no one would mistake Krauss’s “expanded field” for Youngblood’s
“expanded consciousness.” If expanded cinema reveled in heterogeneity, it did not enjoy any position on Krauss’s Klein group model for a redefinition of the space of art. Krauss plotted a “logical” field of disturbances that centered on the modernist paradigm of medium specificity in sculpture. This new order acknowledged a general turn to the
26 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 situational, the social, to the imbrication of formal and political dissonance in a broader definition of artistic practice. Expanded cinema embraced this anxiety as part of a more general exploration of the implications posed by the moving image for the other arts.
Where for Krauss the moving image was a problem for sculpture, for expanded cinema practitioners sculpture was one of many possible modalities transformed by the moving image. Later, Krauss would complicate her arguments in formulating a “post-medium condition,” citing the changes wrought by artists’ use of video technology. Each position, in its own way, contended with the moving image as an increasingly common condition of everyday life. Art historian Eve Meltzer productively historicizes this development in her recent book Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist
Turn. Meltzer writes from the premise that, “the structural and conceptual figures in question have had a discursive and aesthetic life, and that that double life requires us to think formal and intellectual structures together through a kind of careful conceptual management and measurement of the real and the imaginary.”51 Libidinal Engineers aims to contribute to this dialogue through a series of cases in which we might find a modulation of the real and the imaginary on terms of technical-libidinal operations specific to automatic control systems, to explicate the “double life” of automatic control.
Uroskie shows that expanded cinema projects of the mid-1960s, most often associated with multiscreen projection, were a culmination of rich and long-developing experimentation with the locational character of cinema. The idea of expanded cinema was defined by “consciousness of the paradoxical site specificity of cinema practice”:
51 Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10.
27 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 rejuvenation of the avant-garde demanded reinvention of institutional conditions.52
Awareness of this necessity arose from protocols of production, exhibition, and spectatorship, determined by the studio system of Hollywood. Artists’ consideration of cinema’s material technology was to contend necessarily with these protocols.
Examination of cinema’s ontology were fraught by massive, determining infrastructure.
“Rather than asking how film was articulated as an artistic medium, we need to ask instead how the very idea of ‘medium’ was being transformed by the essentially hybrid and diffuse nature of the moving image. Doing so requires taking seriously the metaphor of spatial dislocation that lies at the heart of the term ‘expanded cinema.’”53 Uroskie posits not “what is cinema?,” in André Bazin’s fundamental question of film studies, but
“where is cinema?” The idea of cinema is inextricable from its contingent sites of exhibition. Uroskie argues that expanded cinema offers not so much an innovation in media application as a symptom of untenable processes of control. The expanded cinema appears as the effect of more sophisticated currents of experimentation arising first from within an institutional framework. “Rhetoric of immersion” was a commonplace well before the term expanded cinema was in circulation.54
52 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 11.
53 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 12.
54 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 22.
28 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 5. Chapter Summary
Chapter One: “Strangeloves: From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station
Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War,” analyzes Michael Snow’s classic experimental film La région centrale within a new, hitherto unconsidered historical context: Canada-United States military relations in the Cold War. My reading is supported by new interviews and archival research. My claims follow information from my interviews with Pierre Abbeloos, the designer and fabricator of the Camera Activating
Machine (CAM) used by Snow to make his film. Abbeloos describes how he based his design of the CAM on a World War II-era “precision ranging panel,” a form of antiaircraft equipment common to Allied armed forces. I elaborate on his account through consultation of United States defense industry reports that detail the servo systems to which the CAM is a direct relation. Further, my chapter draws from my extensive research in the Michael Snow Fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As the Snow Fonds show, Snow originally sought out industrial-grade surveillance technologies by which to move his camera in production of his “gigantic landscape film.” Further, I have discovered Snow produced La région centrale very near to Pinetree Line Air Defense
Radar Outpost Moisie C-33, a remote surveillance station in the first early warning system built by the Canada and United States militaries in the early years of the Cold
War. Following these discoveries, I argue that the well-established readings by film scholars P. Adams Sitney and Annette Michelson of La région centrale as a metaphor for ecstatic transcendental states must be contextualized in Cold War discourses of surveillance. Two radar systems—the station at Moisie and Snow’s CAM—were
29 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 developed for ostensibly different purposes yet reckoned with similar anxieties of representation. One was produced by institutions of national defense, the other by an artist exploring the physiological effects of cinema, yet in a way they scanned “in tandem.” Two radar were spinning next to each other in the tundra, striving to look beyond their immediate position to the future: one to the threat of nuclear war, the other to the operational limits of a cinematographic apparatus.
Chapter Three: “Meat System in Köln: Carolee Schneemann and the Electronic
Activation Room” examines Schneemann’s Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, a site-specific multimedia installation generated in Köln for Harald Szeemann’s famed exhibition Happening & Fluxus (1970) derived in part from the personal collection of historical materials assembled by Hans Sohm. There is no analysis of this work in the voluminous literature on Schneemann. This is largely due to the fact that the only documentation of the work was in the artist’s personal possession; Schneemann has granted me access to this material. My chapter draws on extensive interviews with
Schneemann, as well as new information I have drawn from the Carolee Schneemann
Papers held by Stanford University and the Hans Sohm Archive at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
I offer an account of how Carolee Schneemann utilized servomechanical theory and devices of automatic control as a means to explicate issues of sexuality and gender immanent to wartime culture in the 1960s and 70s. The Electronic Activation Room barraged viewers with projections of Vietnam atrocity photographs, clips from radio and pop songs. German television spewed from stacks of monitors. Slide and film projections of Schneemann’s previous kinetic theater projects overlapped. The images lost their
30 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 representational coherence in their numerous appearance. They were further atomized by a custom-made “mirror box” apparatus operated by servo motors. Together, the images became a semi-abstract swirl of light and motion with fleeting evocations of the matters they depicted. “Human intrusion detectors” and switching mechanisms, in use by the defense industries in Vietnam most famously in “Operation: Igloo White” on the Ho Chi
Minh Trail, activated the projections. In the Electronic Activation Room we find a radical reconfiguration of the relation between artists’ medium and electronic mass media. By means of the historical context of automatic control, directly and explicitly engaged by
Schneemann in her multimedia designs, we find in her work something more akin to the
“remarkable apparatus” described in Kafka’s well-known story In the Penal Colony
(1919): the notion of medium as killing machine. We find Schneemann contending with the affective character of technical-libidinal operations in the later Vietnam era, when popular revolt against state-sponsored oppression passed its apex, and neoliberal ideology and conservative cultural rhetoric was in its early formation.
My view is sharpened through contextualization of a hitherto unconsidered detail of Schneemann’s most notorious performance, Interior Scroll (1975). Missing from any account of this defining work of feminist body art is analysis of Schneemann’s first drawing in preparation for the performance. In the drawing, we see a rendering of the action the artist will make: a series of poses expressing an arch ritualism and a mocking challenge to the submissive role of the live nude female model. Schneemann removes from her vagina a scroll of paper on which she has written a statement of protest against the exclusion of women, and especially herself, from American experimental film culture
31 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 —in particular the rhetoric of Annette Michelson, the primary interlocutor of apparatus theory in the United States. Alongside the rendering, Schneemann wrote two words, underlined: “the message.” Schneemann’s notation suggests that the work be considered within not only discourses of performance and experimental film, but also a re- articulation of the motif of “the muse” in relation to the media theorist Marshall
McLuhan and his famous dictum “the medium is the message.” For Schneemann, women’s bodies had always been the medium of a limited series of messages: housewife, maid, model, muse. The combination of “control and communication in the animal and machine” was a conceit of male privilege. For Schneemann, any theory of messages could not be disentangled from her lived circumstances of technical-libidinal overdetermination. The popular McLuhan jargon and cybernetic utopias were exactly that: jargon and utopias. They demanded evisceration. This technical-libidinal recursion will be further explored in the work of Tom Sherman, in which we find an ambivalent
“period vision” of telecommunications technologies, its predetermined channels that offer the veneer of personal choice, a historically contingent concern with the Self turning into
Other: a Cold War anxiety of infiltration.
Chapter Four: “Tom Sherman and the Influencing Machines,” begins with an account of how a photograph of Tom Sherman in a ganzfeld experiment came to appear on the cover of the classic anthology Video By Artists (1976). The chapter explicates systems aesthetics and technical-libidinal operations in Sherman’s work. I present a new view to how this central figure in Cold War-era media art negotiated an ambivalent position between “open system” aspirations of the anti-establishment avant-garde and
32 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “closed world” discourses of governmental institutions. I then turn back to the performance Hyperventilation, first staged at Eastern Michigan University, in a classroom corridor and transmitted on closed circuit video to a monitor in the corridor with the camera, and Sherman. Students emerged from their classes to find their exit blocked by not only Sherman’s form, rhythmically heaving into a kind of mannered hysterical fit, but an arrangement of machines taking in this action. Predating the self-harm works of Chris
Burden such as his notorious Shoot of 1971, Sherman’s Hyperventilation and its complementary performance of media presents an acute awareness of the fraught character of the idea of communication as much as its apparatuses. In this way,
Hyperventilation is not so much devoted to insight, but a hyperbolic struggle for Sherman to manage psychophysical rapport with his environment. We will find this ambivalence throughout Sherman’s subsequent work, in texts such as “The Art-Style Computer
Processing System” (1974), performances staged for photo-documentation such as
Breathing Apparatus (This message is about the condition of your body) (1974), and articulated as reports “from within the cultural-industrial compound” (1981). This chapter culminates with discussion of Sherman’s work for the Canadian government in the
Canada Council for the Arts where, as the first Video Officer in the Visual Art Section of the Canada Council, then as Founding Head of the Media Arts Section, Sherman was pivotal to the administration of federal support for media arts in Canada during the 1980s.
Sherman envisioned himself as a “cultural engineer” in terms of discourses of power while Canada, as a nation, increasingly incorporated information processing technologies into its bureaucracy. I will argue that Sherman is what Reinhold Martin calls an
33 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “institutional medium,” a pervasive yet curiously invisible force, impacting its environment at the crossing of creative personal production and social administration.
Through Sherman, the burgeoning synthesis of cybernetic theory and avant-garde media art practice comes into focus. My analysis is informed by research in the artist’s personal archives, unpublished materials, and extensive interviews with the artist and his associates.
6. A Remarkable Apparatus
Throughout this dissertation I will argue that we might, to follow Kafka in his story In the
Penal Colony, find some understanding through the wounds inflicted by our control systems. “It would be pointless to tell him,” the officer says of the prisoner trapped within the Apparatus that enacts both judgement and execution. “He will learn it in his own flesh.”55 In Kafka’s story, the epiphany sought by the devoted officer in his merger with the Apparatus is answered by way of an iron spike through his head. Through the libidinal engineering of Michael Snow, Carolee Schneemann, and Tom Sherman, we find a correlative working-through of the restive materialism that troubles any attributions of liberatory potential to a machine. As we learn at the end of Kafka’s story that the murderous Apparatus is but a symptom of a generalized seduction of the penal colony inhabitants by authoritarian power, the servomechanism is yet one more iteration in the condition of control societies. Philosopher Judith Butler writes, “If the creation of values,
55 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” (1919), The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 79.
34 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 that historical mode of signification, requires the destruction of the body, much as the instrument of torture in Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ destroys the body on which it writes, then there must be a body prior to that inscription, stable and self-identical, subject to that sacrificial destruction.”56 Throughout this dissertation, we shall find a range of pressures upon the historical mode of signification and its proposed concomitant body that is “stable and self-identical,” from Snow’s quivering prosthesis in the subarctic landscape of the DEW Line; to Schneemann’s Meat System with its mirror system fixed to a “pulsing diaphragm” reactive to spectators’ movement, position, and heat; to
Sherman’ Hyperventilation, where the body in all is presented as a phantom limb, inducing himself to temporary catatonia, methodically, carefully, like a machine—stable, self-identical—and committed to his own destruction. “To envision it [cybernetics] in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare,” Shulamith Firestone wrote in
1970. Yet, as we shall see, cybernetics would not be extricated from existing arrangements of power: it was immanent to that power. The cruelest turn of cybernetics— and its most vulnerable to re-appropriation, as we shall see in the artwork examined here
—was its suggestion that anyone was in control at all: a rationalism of irrational constitution, a formulation of control from a wish to be controlled.
Cybernetics could mold to the measure of individuality, adapting individuality itself—the romance of the Greek “steersman” of its namesake—to the purposes of a control dynamic, and evacuate any sense of the term while it promised ever more independence, security, assuredness, a sensation of immediacy, exactly where it had
56 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) (New York: Routledge, 1999), 165-166.
35 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 induced its abdication. “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress,” Herbert
Marcuse began One-Dimensional Man.57 Cold War automatic control travelled far from the rarified mathematics and physics laboratories into a vernacular chain of equivalences between human and machine for not, as Firestone hoped, the diminishment of labor, reproductive and otherwise, but rather increasingly sophisticated programs for the determination of life—comfortable, smooth, reasonable—yet with devastating consequences across a range of parameters. It will be the mission of this dissertation to examine the “token technical progress” diagnosed by Marcuse, the grinding out of social relations through technocratic infrastructures as they are presented in particular fashion through the work of Michael Snow, Carolee Schneemann, and Tom Sherman. Automatic control concretized into an instrumentalization of desire, an administration of doom. “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality,”
Michael Herr wrote of the American military response to the Tet Offensive across Viet
Nam in 1968. “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”58 Three artists sought to stave off that doom, to redirect that machine’s compulsions, if not stop it entirely. This dissertation tells a story of their efforts.
57 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 1.
58 Herr, Dispatches, 71.
36 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 2.
Strangeloves:
From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station Moisie,
and Media Cultures of the Cold War
1. Technological Monsters
On September 14, 1970, Michael Snow, Pierre Abbeloos, Joyce Wieland, and Bernard
Goussard planted a custom-made, servomechanical monopod into an allegedly empty tract of Eastern Canada. To the monopod they attached a Arriflex ST 16 mm motion picture camera. They anchored the machines to the ground with a cubic meter of cement mixed at the site. They did so for the purpose of creating Snow’s “gigantic landscape film,” entitled La Région Centrale (1971).1 The film is widely recognized as a canonical achievement in the history of avant-garde cinema. Snow chose the site for its remoteness, its “complete wilderness with nothing man-made visible.”2 The film begins with the apparatus turning its camera in slow, smooth sweeps. A machinic vision scans the boulders, mottled scrub grass, and blue skies. As the film proceeds into its third hour, the apparatus turns in rapid somersaults and figure-eight patterns. Its movement crescendoes.
The images blur; the scene is atomized into a flicker of brown and blue, brown and blue.
By their speed, the images mutate from indifferent record to pulsating abstraction. The
1 Michael Snow, “La Région Centrale” (1969), The Michael Snow Project: The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1994), 53.
2 Michael Snow, in conversation with Charlotte Townsend, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale” (Halifax, December 1970), Film Culture 52 (Spring 1971): 62.
37 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 frame itself turns from mimetic container to aggressive matter in itself, attaining a kind of shimmering substance in projection. Snow wished that “the reality of these circular movements” would come into dynamic competition with the landscape and the psycho- physiological stability of the viewer.3 Snow drafted (but did not submit) an application for a British Provisional Patent for the apparatus. In the application he efficiently named it the “Camera Activating Machine.”4 Considered apart and in tandem, the film and the
Camera Activating Machine (hereafter abbreviated “CAM”) offer an as yet unconsidered and complex case through which to understand the media cultures of the Cold War.
Snow, Abbeloos, Wieland, Goussard, and their “technological monster,” to use
Amos Vogel’s appellation, were not alone in the frozen tundra of Canada six hundred and fifty kilometers north of Quebec.5 Nearby, another technological monster of a decidedly more sophisticated kind was in operation: Pinetree Line Radar Station Moisie C-33, part of the first Air Defense Radar networks built by the United States and Canadian governments.6 CFS Moisie was located in the village of Moisie, population 988 in 1971.7
The village of Moisie occupied a narrow horn of land in the subarctic North Shore region
3 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58.
4 Art Gallery of Ontario, Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Michael Snow Fonds, Box 10, File 5. (Hereafter abbreviated “Snow Fonds.”)
5 Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (1974) (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 102.
6 In 1968, the Royal Canadian Air Force and other Canadian armed forces were merged under the designation Canadian Forces. I shall refer to the radar station by its name at the time of the production of La Région Centrale: Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Moisie.
7 1971 Census of Canada, Catalog 92-705, Vol. 1-Part: 1 (Bulletin 1.1-5) (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1972), Table 6, Page 27. In 2003, the villages of Moisie and Gallix merged with the city of Sept-Îles.
38 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 of Quebec where the Moisie River meets the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Moisie was twenty- two kilometers east of Sept-Îles, one of the northernmost cities in Canada. Snow and
Wieland met Abbeloos and Goussard in Montreal, then flew to Sept-Îles’s small airport set between the city and Radar Station Moisie. From there, Snow chartered a helicopter by which the group (“like a surveying party,” as he described in his production notes8) traveled to the site at which they planted the CAM and camped for five days, between
September 14 and 20, 1970.9 While Snow and Abbeloos were familiar with the Distant
Early Warning Line (DEW Line), widely advertised by the American and Canadian Air
Forces and their contractors, Snow and Abbeloos claim to have been unaware of the
Moisie station.10 However, their helicopter most definitely required permission from CFS
Moisie before entering its air space. Their position was approximately fifty kilometers from CFS Moisie. In the meeting of the CAM and CFS Moisie, a project of “radical aspiration” crossed the overdetermined “closed world” of Cold War defense
8 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 2.
9 The published dates of the film’s production vary, and the dates which I assert may be contested. Stéfani de Loppinot gives the dates of production as September 12-16, 1970. See Stéfani de Loppinot, La Région centrale de Michael Snow: Voyage dans la quatrième dimension, Crisnée, Belgium: Yellow Now, 2010, 107. However, these dates seem to correspond to a prospective schedule drafted by Snow prior to his deployment to Sept-Îles, not the actual shooting schedule. See Snow Fonds, box 10, file 2. David Tomas gives the dates as “between September 27 and October 1.” See David Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 78. My account follows the dates given in invoices handwritten by Joyce Wieland: “Sept 1970 Montreal, Received from Michael Snow, Assistance - La Région Centrale - $100.00, Sept. 14 to 20, [signed] Joyce Wieland.” This range is corroborated by Snow’s production notes dated to the confirmed period of production (September 1970), and by an invoice from Sono Lab which places Snow back in Toronto no later than September 22. See Snow Fonds, box 10, file 1.
10 Michael Snow, interview with the author, December 5, 2012, Toronto; and Pierre Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 20, 2012, Montreal.
39 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 infrastructure.11 As we shall see, the allegedly empty landscape of Northern Quebec was the site of grave competition.
The CAM demands that we consider it and the “gigantic landscape film” it recorded in the context of another kind of survey of North American terrain conducted by international military forces. Each “base” (Snow’s term)12 nurtured scanning systems comprised of similar engineering based on a system of servomechanisms: one produced by institutions of (inter)national defense, the other by artist-engineers. While each employed their machines for ostensibly different purposes, they reckoned with similar anxieties of perception. In a kind of kinetic synchronicity, the two systems strove to realize a vision beyond their technological capabilities: CFS Moisie, conceived to aid in the detection, identification, interception, and destruction of Soviet bombers and their nuclear weapons; the CAM, imagined by Snow and built by Abbeloos to make a film by which to challenge a viewer’s psychophysiological limits in a cinematic situation. The creators of the CAM and CFS Moisie relied on similar terms to describe their aspirations.
Each in their own way sought to produce, by means of automatic control, an “absolute record of a piece of wilderness.”13
In the CAM, we find a device built to make a film “equal in terms of film to the great landscape paintings of Cézanne, Poussin, Corot, Monet, Matisse and in Canada the
11 See Annette Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” Film Culture 42 (Fall 1966), and Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996).
12 Snow Fonds, box 9, file 6.
13 Snow, “La Région Centrale,” Collected Writings, 56.
40 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Group of Seven.”14 To do so, Snow collected and annotated aerial photographs and topographical maps—the civilian counterpart to data collected by the air defense radar system.15 In CFS Moisie, we find one among scores of interconnected surveillance stations that ostensibly manifested the sensory capabilities of the United States and
Canadian militaries and their control over the North American landscape. The two machines were devoted to intensive discourses of representation. The historical fact of their shared technology asserts the tension in their disparate conditions of production.
Each provides insight to the other, and to the larger, determining complex of Cold War media cultures.
2. Arctic Eyes That Never Sleep
Snow first devised the operational intent of the Camera Activating Machine in 1964, contemporaneous with his other “camera movement” films, Wavelength (1967) and <—>
[“Back and Forth”] (1969). In La Région Centrale, he sought to move a camera, freely,
“in every direction and on every plane of a sphere.”16 In his preliminary search for a machine which might fulfill this mission, Snow looked to surveillance devices. He collected literature from Pelco Industries, the international video security systems firm based in Gardena, California. The literature consists of data on pan-and-tilt accessory mounts, joy stick controls, variable speed modular controls for zoom lenses and remote
14 Snow, “La Région Centrale,” Collected Writings, 53.
15 Snow Fonds, box 11, file 1.
16 Michael Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” Film Culture 52 (Spring 1971), 58. Emphasis in original.
41 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 enclosure control, units for desk top and rack mounts, and zoom lenses for security cameras: apparatuses for civilian, commercial use. Snow went so far as to price out specific Pelco devices by which he hoped to produce his film.17 As much as his work in cinema, Snow’s idea for the apparatus also shares kinship with Slidelength (1969-1971), his concurrent work with 35-mm slides. In sketches in which Snow imagines the CAM’s operations, the movement he draws suggests a reversal of the action of a 35-mm slide carousel. In a carousel, a single slide is tipped into a constant beam of light for projection outward to a screen; Snow’s sketches suggest the entire frame of vision constantly
“tipped” in the 16-mm frame. Light enters the camera to register the view, while the whole machine tips and tilts.18 In other words, to fulfill these complex actions, a custom- made apparatus was required. Snow was “asking for something that did not exist.”19
In 1968, seeking an engineer for such an apparatus, Snow contacted Graeme
Ferguson, who had recently co-founded the IMAX Corporation in Montreal. Ferguson recommended Abbeloos, then 23 years-old, an engineer with two and a half years experience at the National Film Board of Canada. Abbeloos assisted in the construction of the camera used for the first IMAX film, Tiger Child (1970), which premiered at Expo
17 Snow Fonds, 10-5. Pelco was founded in 1957. The firm provided closed-circuit (CCTV) or Internet protocol (IP) video security systems to the 2001 Genoa G-8 Summit, 2004 Athens Olympics, the Statue of Liberty, and the New York headquarters of Sotheby’s, among many other clients. In 2007, Pelco was purchased by Schneider Electric, an international energy management corporation founded in the nineteenth century. Schneider Electric is headquartered in a structure called the Hive (Hall de l’Innovation et Vitrine de l’Energie) in Rueil-Malmaison, France. See the official websites for Pelco
18 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
19 Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012, Montreal.
42 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 70 in Osaka, among other innovations in technologies of multi-image presentation.
Abbeloos required a year to complete the CAM. One hundred and eighty kilograms in all, the CAM consists of a complex system of servomechanisms, also known as feedback amplifiers, for the propulsion of the motion picture camera and its counter-weights.20 As the Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer LeRoy MacColl states in his Fundamental
Theory of Servomechanisms, a servomechanism is a device for the automatic control of input and output variables, such as the movement of an antiaircraft weapon within a predetermined range of motion.21
The CAM’s infrastructure was derived in part from World War II-era antiaircraft technologies selected from aviation surplus resellers. Abbeloos built upon the engineering of air defense “precision ranging panels” (also called “strike panels”). A precision ranging system is used to calculate the flightpath of a hostile aircraft and coordinate responsive fire.22 A radar unit and a computer determine the position of the target and its anticipated future position to which a weapon is directed by means of automated servomechanisms. For the CAM, Abbeloos modified this configuration into an inward- directed, closed system: the CAM’s directing computer was responsive to alteration of its
20 My account follows materials in the Snow Fonds, in particular box 10, file 5; and Snow, interview with the author, December 5, 2012, Toronto; and Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012, Montreal.
21 LeRoy A. MacColl, Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms (New York: D. van Nostrand and Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1945).
22 See David F. Winkler, Searching the Skies: The Legacy of the United States Cold War Defense Radar Program (Langley Air Force Base, Virginia: United States Air Force Air Combat Command and Champaign, Illinois: United States Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, 1997); Barry Leonard, History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, Volume I (1945-1955) and Volume II (1956-1972) (Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History, 2009).
43 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 power source, the input of electromotive force from an arrangement of six, six-volt batteries and a back-up gasoline generator. Horizontal, vertical and rotational movements, and the camera’s zoom and motor were bolted by rotary connections, controlled by a regulator (the “control box”). The range of motion—free, spherical actions around a central point, without showing the apparatus as such—was enabled by twenty-four slip rings and epicyclic gearing, so-called satellite gear boxes assembled by Abbeloos. In this way, actions made by the CAM array were determined by the tolerances of its engineering. Its purpose, by design, was movement alone. Velocity was its mission.
Precision ranging systems determine a target bearing in relation to its observer position in a spherical coordinate system. This calculation process is described as finding
“the relative azimuth.” The observer position—that being the radar itself—is the “central region.” Wieland saw the phrase “la région centrale” in a physics book in a Quebec City bookstore, and she suggested it to Snow as the name of the film.23 Though the exact book
Wieland consulted is unknown to us, she most likely selected the phrase from a reference to this foundational equation of radar physics.24 Thus, to Regina Cornwell’s rhetorical questions, “But then what is the central region? Is it a toponym or is it a metaphor for camera and spectator?,” we may answer that it is a term from the natural sciences—a term utilized in the physics of fire control. Cornwell concludes that La Région Centrale
23 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58.
24 For one textbook containing this material on radar physics, see W. M. Cady, M. B. Karelitz, and Louis A. Turner, eds., Radar Scanners and Radomes (New York: McGraw-Hill and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Defense Research Committee, Radiation Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1948).
44 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “uses nature in order to explore it, abstract it, reveal its beauty, its distance.”25 Situated in its specific historical context, however, metaphorical attributions fall away to reveal a whirling, wheezing, battery and gasoline-powered machine spawned from the urgency of total war.
To modulate the speed and direction of the CAM, Abbeloos exploited the similarities between the crystal oscillator for a radar precision ranging system and the pulse synchronization mechanism already built into 16-mm cameras. He redirected the 60 hertz synch pulses into control signals; that is, he applied the given electromechanical signal used for the maintenance of sound speed in a cinematographic apparatus (here, the
“selsyn,”—short for “self-synchronizing”—motor of an Arriflex BL camera) into a spectrum of frequencies that determined the horizontal, vertical, and rotational motion of the machine, and operation of the zoom on the attached camera. The CAM control box was constructed of eight Arborite board-mounted circuits routed to a speed spectrum of one to ten, one being slowest and ten being the fastest capability of the motors. The control box transmitted the pulses to a diode which created tones which then activated the power source. Snow wished the film’s soundtrack to consist of these tones, in simultaneous inscription to the actions of the CAM. Snow sought to “programme the whole thing with sound tapes so that we’d compose the sound first and that would give instructions to the machine to move and then I would use that as the [sound]track. […]
[T]he visual part of it [Le Région Centrale] was composed in terms of sound. And so
25 Regina Cornwell, Snow Seen: The Films and Photographs of Michael Snow (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1980), 119 and 122.
45 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 there’d be this reverse relationship, at least in production.”26 While simultaneous inscription of those pulses onto the film was too complicated, the tones were transmitted to a modified Revox serial recorder which recorded them to quarter-inch magnetic tape, which Snow then post-dubbed. At the time, a tone discriminator of the necessary sophistication was inaccessible (they existed only in the facilities of military contractors such as Bell Labs or MIT), but would have assisted in the desired simultaneous recording of the pulses as they propelled the CAM.27 In this combination of telephonic tone discriminators and home-made pseudo-integrated circuits, the CAM was a mixture of semi-automatic digital and analog computing components. After inputting a series of actions via the control box, Snow allowed the CAM to determine its own trajectory: a contrived, semi-automatic pilot. “I only looked in the camera once,” he claimed. “The film was made by the planning and by the machinery itself.”28 The particular models of the precision ranging systems from which Abbeloos derived inspiration were obsolete by the time of his contract with Snow in 1969. But they were the direct precedents to the equipment of the air defense radar systems, including those in use at CFS Moisie.
The physics of precision ranging systems, theories of servomechanisms, feedback amplifiers, and automatic control were of course foundational to Norbert Wiener’s work on the antiaircraft predictor at MIT in the early 1940s, and his subsequent theories of
26 Michael Snow, in “The Camera and the Spectator: Michael Snow in Discussion with John du Cane” (1973), Collected Writings, 89.
27 Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012, Montreal.
28 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 62.
46 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 cybernetics.29 As Peter Galison has observed, in Wiener’s vision, “servomechanical theory would become the measure of man.”30 As noted in the Introduction, Wiener claimed that the “synapse is nothing but a precise mechanism,” that it “must have its precise analogue in the computing machine.”31 Contemporaneous criticism of Wiener’s definition of purposefulness brought into relief that which his theories elided, such as desire, pleasure, pain: inner states less readily quantifiable.32 N, Katherine Hayles writes,
“What tends to drop from sight [in the earliest definitions of cybernetics] is the fact that the equation between organism and machine works because it is seen from a position formulated precisely so that it will work.” For Wiener, cybernetics is “about relation, not essence. The analogical relations it constructs are therefore not merely rhetorical figures but are systems that generate the only kind of significance available to us as perceiving, finite beings with no access to unmediated reality.”33 In contrast, the CAM was devised to assert the centrality of contingency in definitions of the machine. Snow sought “ecstasy and analysis” variable to the character of the viewing subject.34 The apparently
“purposeless,” unaccountable behavior Wiener wished to delimit, and, later, the vagaries
29 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1948). See Wiener’s discussion of MacColl’s theory of servomechanisms on pages 7 and 19.
30 Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 240.
31 Wiener, Cybernetics, 14.
32 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 249-252.
33 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 94 and 97.
34 Michael Snow, “Michael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation” (1982), Collected Writings, 226.
47 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 of inner states which the air defense radar system engineers strived to regulate by automatic control devices, were the catalyzing premise of the CAM and La Région
Centrale. Indeed, Snow mapped the actions of the CAM in seismographic waveforms in a manner not unlike what in the field of psychophysics is described as an ascending and descending method of limits.35
CFS Moisie was active from May 25, 1953 until August 1, 1988.36 “C-33” was the station’s identification in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE)
Command and Control System, a combination of analog and digital computers for centralized air defense management. Unprecedented in its sophistication, SAGE connected the scores of Air Defense Radar stations throughout the Canadian landscape in the Pinetree/Permanent Line, Mid-Canada Line, and, further north, the better-known
DEW Line.37 The Pinetree Line alone was comprised of forty-nine stations dispersed along the 50th and 53rd parallels. Moisie joined the SAGE system on November 1, 1963.
The station held three radome configurations, white and bubble-like, one of them a R.
35 George A. Gescheider, Psychophysics: The Fundamentals (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976).
36 My account of the history of CFS Moisie, the village of Moisie, and Sept-Îles, draws on materials published by the Air Defense Radar Veterans’ Association and Radomes, Inc. See
37 On the history of the DEW Line, see Samuel Edward Twitchell, The Incomplete Shield: The Distant Early Warning Line and the Struggle for Effective Continental Air Defense, 1950-1960, Master’s thesis (Ames, IA: Iowa State University, 2011) and Kenneth Schaffel, The Emerging Shield: The Air Force and the Evolution of Continental Air Defense (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force, 1991).
48 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Buckminster Fuller-designed geodesic dome.38 Each housed instruments built by Bell
Labs, MIT, Bendix, General Electric, Douglas, and Westinghouse, among other contractors.39 At the end of the 1960s, the radar antennas at CFS Moisie were constituted by a complex array of servomechanisms controlled by a combination of semi-automatic analog and digital computing systems, such as SAGE—engineering also utilized, as we have seen, in custom-built form in the CAM.
Snow described the CAM as a part of a “cosmic continuity which is beautiful, but tragic: it just goes on without us;”40 Bell Labs celebrated its “arctic eye that never sleeps.” However, these metaphors of omniscience and infinitude were not matters of fact, but of (thwarted) desire materialized in surveillance apparatuses. The CAM and CFS
Moisie were not only technological, but also imaginative systems: for the Snow-
Abbeloos invention, it was by design, while in the case of the the SAGE system, its fantastical aspirations were so far in excess of its actual performance that, as historian
Paul N. Edwards writes, it was more effective as “a dream, a myth, a metaphor for total defense, a technology of closed-world discourse.”41 As I will demonstrate, the CAM and
38 For more on Fuller’s invention and its popularization, see Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Eva Díaz, “Dome Culture in the Twenty-first Century,” Grey Room 42 (Winter 2011): 80-105; Diedrich Diederichsen and Anslem Franke, Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Sternberg Press, 2013); and Richard Fairfield, et al, The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the ‘60s and ‘70s (Port Townsend, WA: Process Press, 2010).
39 Moisie’s radar included Search models FPS-3, FPS-502, and FPS-27, and Height models TPS-502, FPS-6, and FPS-26. For more specifics on this equipment and other technologies in use in the Air Defense Radar network, see Winkler, Searching the Skies and Leonard, History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, Volume I and Volume II.
40 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 63.
41 Edwards, The Closed World, 111.
49 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 CFS Moisie were materializations of common anxieties and yearnings outside the purview of their ascribed justifications, beyond those declared to spur their initial conception. The technology itself was the purpose. For five days in 1970, the CAM and
CFS Moisie spun side-by-side in a coterminous mission of self-regard.
When considered together in their shared context of Cold War media cultures,
CFS Moisie and the CAM reveal a common devotion to their own technological operation, to the process of their own functioning that was distinct from, even surpassed, their professed aim to amplify human sensory capacity, within the proscriptions of continental air defense on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. The CAM whirled at such high speeds to almost induce its self-destruction, its ostensible purpose belied by its actual operation. At CFS Moisie, radar arrays rotated at six cycles per minute, their attending airmen watching for Soviet long-range bombers—promise of their own destruction—to cross their cathode ray television monitors (“scopes”). As the Soviet development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 1957 nullified the efficacy of systems built to detect long-range aircraft, the case of CFS Moisie was especially poignant: by 1964 it was “hardly even a surveillance station except in a back-up role. […]
The squadron has no control capability.”42 Its airmen watched for threats their instruments could not see, to which they could not respond, and that may never arrive.
“Soviet aircraft have not been officially known to venture this far inland and the station probably dealt more often with search and rescue work [in civilian and military
42 SAGE 211 AC&W Squadron, Moisie, Quebec, Appendix A to Unit Historical Report, January–December 1964 (Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1964), cited on The Pinetree Line
50 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 incidents].”43 As Eric Schlosser describes, “America’s early warning systems were deeply flawed—and, as a result, the most reliable indicator of a Soviet attack might be the destruction of those systems by nuclear blasts.”44 Airmen assigned to the Early Warning
Line stations devised their own definition for the SAGE acronym: “Soviet Aircraft
Guaranteed Entry.”45
3. Matter into Energy
By the third hour of La région centrale, in the sublime fury of its twists and turns, one might expect the camera suddenly to detach and crash, flung by the intense forces generated by the Camera Activating Machine. Total destruction appears almost inevitable. The ostensible purpose of a camera seems increasingly untenable against the vehicle of such awesome velocity: maintenance of a uniform frame rate by the camera motor, balanced exposure of the film stock, stable operation of the gate and claw, are all acutely jeopardized by the intensity of speed. Indeed, as can be clearly seen in Wieland’s photographs on-site, the CAM’s aluminum skin is bound in part by duct tape. Abbeloos presumed that Snow would use the CAM in an interior, climate-controlled environment such as a hangar or studio. On site, however, it was subjected to rain, cutting wind, snow, and sleet: “All the impossible things you don’t want to happen to a machine.” Following
43 Ozorak, “Moisie, QC: General History.” In an illustration of American determination of air defense at continental scale, CFS Moisie was part of the Bangor Air Defense sector and therefore forwarded its reports to the American SAGE direction center at Topsham Air Force Base in Maine.
44 Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin, 2013), 254.
45 Jack Miller, The Peacekeepers (Las Vegas: Houdini, 2012), 264.
51 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the insistence of his mother, Abbeloos brought with him his one-piece, insulated Ski-Doo snowmobile suit, ensuring that he would survive the sub-zero temperatures after nightfall.
Wieland, however, would have suffered frostbite if not for the warmth emitted by the
CAM gasoline generator.46
While the film apparently looks outward, it constantly reminds a viewer of the workings making that view possible—especially so when the image becomes indecipherable as landscape, a “complete smear.”47 The landscape becomes arbitrary; correlation between the site and its representation increasingly relies on our imagination.
Apperceptions of content become more and more untenable as the film-as-matter accrues a more palpable weight. As Victoria Schultz observed at the time of the film’s initial release, “The relentless speed annihilates the landscape, changes it into an unrecognizable flat surface.”48 The CAM stands apparently alone, on the verge of dismembering itself in the process of fulfilling its mission. The representational, documentary capability of the camera is threatened; it collapses under the pressure of the custom-made apparatus that extrapolates, exaggerates the camera’s motions: the “gigantic landscape film” is sought so intensively that it is foreclosed.
Tellingly, Snow dismissed alteration of the exposed film stock. In his pre- production notes on the film’s conclusion, he jotted, “the idea of film burning at end:
No.”49 By 1970, Snow was familiar with the common tactic of altering film stock so to
46 Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012, Montreal.
47 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
48 Victoria Schultz, “Film: The Central Region,” The East Village Other (February 1972), 11.
49 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
52 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 diminish the representational (and thereby, it was often argued, given ideological) capacity of the image.50 What we learn in Snow’s dismissal of burning the film, in the context of other evidence in the CAM and the pro-filmic record of La Région Centrale, is that he was committed to challenging the representational capacity of the image by means of the given limits of the apparatuses in themselves. Rather than manipulation of the image through external intervention (such as prolonging the film’s passage through a projector gate to induce melting and burning, found in, for example, Stan Brakhage’s
Prelude: Dog Star Man of 1961), in La Région Centrale we confront an extraordinary exercise in the functional logic of the apparatuses’ processes.51
On the same paper on which Snow noted his dismissal of burning the film, he described an alternative: “film ends at noon with gradual increasing over exposure
(waxing, waning starting with direct sun shots) until film is almost clear then is totally clear. This is the vertical circular pan with accurate focus changes.”52 Snow proposed to overwhelm the exposure capacity of the film stock, but also attempt to maintain focus on the ground, which would be photographed intermittently at the bottom of the vertical circular pan. As seen in the completed film, the images of the sun, near-totally blown out by the flood of light, intercede upon the images of the ground. Snow induced the CAM to
50 On the history of this discourse, see Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977). For an account of analyses of Snow’s cinema in relation to structural/materialism, see Bart Testa, “Axiomatic Cinema: Michael Snow’s Films,” in Presence and Absence: The Michael Snow Project, ed. Jim Shedden (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario,1995), 26-83.
51 The strategy achieved the status of reflexive trope in the avant-garde through the work of Paul Sharits, in films such as Third Degree (1982) and Bad Burns (1982).
52 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
53 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 such high speeds that the circular motion of whole camera seems to overtake the 24 frames-per-second progress of the film strip. Solar flares speckle the blurred rocks: “earth to light.”53 The sun itself is adapted into a cosmic flicker in contrapuntal relation to the given flicker of the filmstrip and projector. We find a radical assertion of the basic technical operations of the network of devices of which the filmic image is one part. In this way, La région centrale uncovers larger technical-libidinal forces at work outside the circumscribed field of vision: the wish for an “absolute record of a piece of wilderness” frustrated by the mode of its production, desire evidenced by means of its fraught delimitation.
Evidence of the apparatus abounds. While Snow may claim a total absence of the apparatus in the film itself, conceding a few appearances of its shadow, we find that the shadow appears regularly throughout the first minutes of the film: it is first seen in the third minute, again in the fourth, the sixth, and in full view in the tenth minute. A few minutes later, the camera records its shadow on almost every turn in a series of vertical somersaults. The shadow appears again in the second reel at 22:32, and so on. Snow’s statements on this point have been perpetuated in the film’s reception in favor of aesthetically-tinged acclaim for transcendental states of spectatorship, awe and wonder.
The CAM’s elision from critical reception may be due in part to the common practice of renting one reel of the film, often the final reel in which the spectacular speed of the device and the distortion-effects of the landscape are in greatest evidence. However, even with this explanation, the shadow of the CAM may be easily identified in the final reel at
53 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
54 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 3:30, 6:15, 9:11, 15:18, 17:00, 18:20, 21:00, 22:11, and 22:20, and following its most intensive spinning motions in the final minutes of climax.
The CAM was exhibited with many screenings of the film. For example, from
March 12 thru April 11, 1971, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the CAM and the film were displayed together under the title From/De la région centrale. Visitors, on their way to the theater, would pass the machine, in operation, now retro-fitted with a closed-circuit video camera attached to four television monitors in the space. Abbeloos added a motion sensor which, triggered by a viewer’s presence, would activate a thirty- minute cycle of movements in the machine.54 A similar arrangement was made in 1972 for Snow’s exhibition About 30 Works by Michael Snow at the Center for Inter-American
Relations in New York, organized by the National Gallery of Canada. La région centrale screened every weekend through the duration of the show (November 15-December 31,
1972), which was “dominated by the unseen star” of the film, as critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in his review of the exhibition. “It is a large, beautiful and altogether fabulous motorized camera mount. […] At the Inter-American Center, it carries a TV camera through swooping and spinning pans of a blue-painted, dimly-lighted room.”55 For that exhibition, Snow renamed the Camera Activating Machine as De La and presented it as a work of sculpture (more on which below). Thus, the CAM, the apparatus “it itself,” eclipsed the film at its first presentations. The “circles within circles and cycles within
54 Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012, Montreal.
55 Peter Schjeldahl, “The Content? Information,” The New York Times, November 26, 1972. See also Barbara Rose’s review, New York Magazine, December 11, 1972.
55 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 cycles” of the CAM was more than a mere means to produce a film.56 The CAM enacted vision as a technical-libidinal process.
Having somehow survived the ordeal of production outside Sept-Îles, the film is a record of stresses, a report on the device as it is compelled to the limits of its material integrity. The frame itself seems vulnerable. As Bart Testa writes, the penultimate night section
“eliminates the frame and reduces the image to a single small dish of light. It is, of course, the moon, and it seems to be moving through the screen, which is impossible yet perceptibly undeniable. The confusion, or rather the contradiction, that arises in the viewer’s mind cracks the assurances that the motifs and structures the film has built up, like the all-important frame line, are not really the formative principles of a transcendental subjectivity.”57
A dialectical relationship is forged between the institutional and discursive claims of this 16 mm window and the viewer’s sensory capabilities. Caught within the machine’s whirling view, one might turn further inward, from the infrastructure that imposes this extraordinary cinematic situation to the suddenly disturbed, unstable state of one’s own psychophysical infrastructure. This calls the viewer’s attention to the limits of her own perception, and in turn to the capacities of the machine (it could only ever be a machine) capable of exhausting the representational power of cinema.
56 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58.
57 See Bart Testa, “Machine in the Garden,” Spirit in the Landscape, 70.
56 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Snow writes of La Région Centrale that he gave “the camera an equal role in the film to what is being photographed.”58 La Région Centrale is the third in his trilogy of camera movement films following Wavelength and <—>. “Wavelength is metaphysics and <—> is physics. By the last I mean the conversion of matter into energy. E = mc2. La
Région continues this but it becomes simultaneously micro and macro, cosmic-planetary as well as atomic. Totality is achieved in terms of cycles rather than action and reaction.
It’s above that.” La Région Centrale is “above” <—> in that it encapsulates the back and forth, the action and reaction, as well as the energy of their transformation; more than just holding two opposing forces in suspension, it strives to literalize their dynamic change.
Snow describes the equivalence of the photographed sky and our experience of sky: they are distinct yet alter each other. Where La Région Centrale may be a record of that process, the CAM is that process in itself. By examining the fraught historical context within which Snow and his team operated in later summer of 1970, we may appreciate the politics of the “cosmic-planetary” physics through which La Région Centrale was produced.
4. Composite Pictures
On August 29, 1949, the USSR detonated an atomic bomb in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist
Republic. The United States harbored deep anxieties about the nuclear capabilities of the
USSR; the events of August 29 further deepened those anxieties. The “air defense problem” was an existential problem. Some form of protection had to be found for the
58 Snow, “La Région Centrale,” The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, 53.
57 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 prospect of annihilation. An “air defense Manhattan Project” was required.59 In late 1949 and 1950, in a continuation of wartime collaboration, studies of defense capabilities were undertaken at MIT. However, the results were less than promising. The euphoria that permeated the MIT Radiation Laboratories during the war dissipated into a bleak dilemma. The Project Charles report of 1951 is indicative. It concluded that the United
States held no adequate means of defense against a Soviet bombardment. For instance,
United States Air Defense Command was still relying on the Ground Observer Corp
(GOC), on Boy Scouts, and other volunteer spotters. These services were inadequately coordinated for a sudden, total assault promised by Soviet bombers and their nuclear weapons; further, GOC participants delivered reports vocally through commercial telephone systems. An attack would be too swift; no warning would come in time. The function of the Ground Observer Corp, “like so much of the macabre apparatus of nuclear war, was primarily ideological,” Edwards writes. “A genuine defense being impossible, a symbolic one was provided instead.”60 Project Charles concluded, “We are unable to point to any new invention, comparable with radar, that would provide a simple solution to the air defense problem.”61 Nevertheless, “there was always the hope of salvation
59 Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 60, citing JCS 2084, November 16, 1949, “Memorandum by the chief of staff, U.S. Air Force for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Air Defense of the United States,” Files of the JCS.
60 Edwards, The Closed World, 90. Regarding the performative character of Cold War nuclear civil defense, see Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
61 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Problems of Air Defense: Final Report of PROJECT CHARLES,” August 1, 1951, Files of the Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, quoted in Joseph T. Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States, and the Origins of North American Air Defence, 1945-1958 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 61.
58 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 through new technology.”62 The United States and Canada constructed hundreds of radar stations, but the Pinetree Line, Mid-Canada Line, and DEW Line were each rendered obsolete almost immediately upon their completion by new electronic countermeasures
(ECMs) and ICBMs. After a decade of preparation the United States Air Force (USAF) assumed control of the DEW Line on July 31, 1957; Sputnik, propelled by an early
ICBM, passed over North America in early October of the same year.63 “The heyday of continental air defense was history—in a few months.”64
Development pressed forward on SAGE. The aim of SAGE was to centralize command and control of the radar station network—a daunting task ultimately involving
256 radar antennas in the Pinetree Line, 98 in the Mid-Canada Line, and 78 in the DEW
Line.65 SAGE was comprised of massive computers of vacuum-tube and punch-card technologies as well as digital data-processing components. The computers were housed within two-acre, four-story, windowless concrete Direction Centers; twenty-two
Direction Centers were built. These computers would facilitate real-time control and coordination of weapons systems based on information provided by the radar stations.
SAGE would “create a composite picture of the air situation as it developed.”66 SAGE
62 Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 60.
63 Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 217.
64 B. Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith: Strategic Defense from Zeppelins to Star Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 138.
65 Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 268.
66 Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 204.
59 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 was activated in 1958, but was obsolete before it was finished.67 As an antiaircraft weapons system it was incapable of accommodating the new threat posed by ICBMs.68
Still more radar installations would be built, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System
(BMEWS), but they would offer a warning time of only minutes.69
SAGE’s “automatic” capabilities were aspiration more than actuality. The enormous financial and material resources devoted to forming SAGE’s “composite pictures” were drawn by impulsions beyond the reach of technological rationalism.
Recall, for example, that CFS Moisie offered negligible usefulness as a surveillance station and was without any control capability. SAGE technicians watched for exactly what they could not see. And the early warning systems were prone to malfunction and false alarms triggered by commercial aircraft and flocks of migrating birds, or provided inadequate coverage. The problem of inadequate coverage to the south by the Ballistic
Missile Early Warning System became especially apparent in the Cuban missile crisis of
1962. “Despite the enormous sums spent on the BMEWS radars facing north, the United
States had absolutely no capability in place to detect a missile launched from the south, from Cuba. Washington policymakers had simply never anticipated that the Soviets
67 Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 207, 223-224, Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 86, and Winkler, Searching the Skies, 41.
68 Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 257.
69 Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 259. For analysis of the “technological imperative” of ICBM systems in particular, see Ernest J. Yanarella, The Missile Defense Controversy: Technology in Search of a Mission (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002). See also Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990) and Gordon Mitchell, Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science, and Politics in Missile Defense Advocacy (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2000).
60 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 would outflank the BMEWS radars in this manner.”70 In 1960, “the BMEWS site at
Thule [Greenland] had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.”71
SAGE, and the early warning radar lines that fed data to its computers, were built to see over the horizon. They sought to automate a process of detection, identification, interception, and destruction of enemy forces: a scheme to eradicate uncertainty by means of technological innovation: prediction via total rationalization. But like the hypnosis from which its operators were prone to suffer, a kind of double-vision was at play between the aspiration and its technological support.72 SAGE was a network of technologies attributed with unprecedented capabilities, yet whose missions continuously mutated. The air defense radar system was an assemblage of machines and discourses defined by aspirations for mastery of the North American Arctic that would be automatic, self-sufficient, and total. These claims for mastery were predicated on the alleged acumen of its sensors.
The network is a prime example of expenditure for the appearance of control in the Cold War-era, expenditure to conceive of the network itself as an image of efficacy that might induce conviction in its own operators as much as their opponents. The white- bubble radomes that pocked the Arctic were like inverted mirror balls, casting a reflection of political and military operatives’ obsessional conceit more than any capacity for
70 Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 122.
71 Schlosser, Command and Control, 254, and Donald MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 23-24.
72 Miller, The Peacekeepers, 28.
61 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 perception of and defense against external phenomena. In absence of utility, even on its own terms of definition, the network is a tragic monument to America's capacity to imagine its own catastrophe. This micro-scene of the Cold War, hundreds of radar stations and control centers and thousands of airmen and civilian contractors in windowless bunkers illuminated by the cool light of their scopes, interconnected through shared technology and discourse, was loaded with contingencies for which its systems could not account. These discrepancies, which propelled voluminous expenditure of resources in support of “a dream, a myth, a metaphor for total defense,” were matched by the raw monotony of perpetual readiness—anticipation occasionally broken by a false alarm, or a “spoof” by Soviet pilots flying into sensor range to test countermeasures or just to glimpse a new fighter-intercepter. Airmen had another definition for SAGE:
“Somebody’s Always Getting Excited.”73
5. Distant Early Warning and the Dreamwork of Imperialism
The RCAF and the USAF developed an increasingly close relationship in the 1950s. This was fostered by reconciliation between the military and academic science and engineering communities through development of the SAGE system. The commanders integrated their air defense systems through Air Defense Canada United States
(ADCANUS). This enthusiasm was in contrast to the political situation. Canadian civilian leaders had worried about being “engulfed,” “overwhelmed” by their powerful neighbor. These grievances formalized in the May 1955 “Statement of Conditions to
73 Miller, The Peacekeepers, 264.
62 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Govern the Establishment of a Distant Early Warning System on Canadian Territory” so to curb the “new American army of occupation.” As Joseph Jockel has shown, a telling result was the creation of a “commander without a command” at the center of their partnership. Communications were scrubbed of references to “command” of Canadian forces by the Americans; rather “authoritative direction” or “integrated operational control” would be carefully respected and shared by the sovereign nations. While there were “no boundaries upstairs” — the skies horrifically, sublimely open—“on the ground, the U.S. and Canadian governments both persisted in pursuing their own national interests.”74 For Canada, this pursuit would include, in 1953-55, the forced relocation and abandonment of Inuit families to the Arctic so to assert its claims on the territory.75
Ultimately, in 1957, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was established through the coordinated insistence of the USAF and RCAF. SAGE evolved within this fraught context of massive expenditure of energy and resources concomitant with strategic and technological impotence, this condition of a “commander without a command.”
By the 1960s, the Americans were pressed by the Canadians to convince them that they were in fact not invading their country. At the same time, the Americans strived to place tactical nuclear weapons in Canada. But in fact the Americans did not want to
74 Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 56-59, 83, 114, and 118.
75 See René Dussault and George Erasmus, The High Arctic Relocation: A Report on the 1953– 55 Relocation, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing, 1994); Frank Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-63 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994); Romani Makkik, “The High Arctic Relocations,” Naniiliqpita (Fall 2009); and Melanie McGrath, The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (New York: Vintage, 2006).
63 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 formalize diplomatic and military channels too seamlessly lest sensitive information slip to Europe through Canada’s alliances in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO).76 Canada and the United States renewed their NORAD agreement in 1968; however Canada found a new international diplomatic identity precisely for its position between the USSR and US. Canada might elude future American coercions, and nuclear decimation, as Jockel notes, “by contributing to a stable mutual deterrence through the protection of the US nuclear deterrent. So conceived, Canada’s role in NORAD was not to serve the [American-controlled] Strategic Air Command but to help protect global stability. Mutual deterrence, in turn, could even be seen as freeing Canada from the burden of its ties with the US.”77 The nations labored to negotiate sovereign distance, a kind of empty center, a center whose edges bristled with the continuously evolving rhetorics and apparatuses of tactical nuclear weapons. Diplomatic care was exercised between Washington and Ottawa while their air forces avidly pursued new technological solutions in the face of their installations’ enduring vulnerability to Soviet assault—“the defense that never was.”78
The Quebec sovereignty movement made its own claims. In the autumn of 1970, members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped British Trade Minister
76 Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 97-98.
77 Jockel, Canada in NORAD, 78 and 88. See also Andrew Burtch, Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’s Cold War Nuclear Civil Defence (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012); John Clearwater, U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1999); John Clearwater, Canadian Nuclear Weapons (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1998); and Andrew Richter, Avoiding Armageddon: Canadian Military Strategy and Nuclear Weapons, 1950-63 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002).
78 Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith, 269.
64 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 James Cross, and kidnapped and executed Quebec Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte.
These events instigated Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa to mobilize the Canadian Army and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, which included the suspension of habeas corpus. What would be known as “La crise d’octobre,” The
October Crisis, began days after Snow and his team returned to their homes in Montreal and Toronto.79 While mentioned only in brief here, the history of the FLQ is manifestly important to this study. As previously noted, Joyce Wieland accompanied her then- husband Snow to the site outside Sept-Îles, and she gave the film its name. Wieland planned, but never realized, a documentary about the making of La Région Centrale entitled A Humane Use of Technology—perhaps a turn on Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings.80 Soon after assisting Snow, Wieland made her film Pierre Vallières
(1972), entitled after its subject, the notorious FLQ leader and author of White Niggers of
America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Québec “Terrorist” first published in
1968.81 Wieland described her film, comprised almost entirely of extreme close-ups of
Vallières’ mustachioed lips as he speaks on Quebec nationalism and women’s rights, as no less than a “mouth-scape.” La Région Centrale, an apparently formalist venture, and
Pierre Vallières, a polemical even propagandistic work, illuminate the complicated
79 See Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); William Tetley, The October Crisis, 1970: An Insider’s View (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); and Robert A. Young, The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).
80 Norbert Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Second Edition [1954] (New York: Da Capo Press, 2011).
81 Pierre Vallières, White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Québec “Terrorist,” trans. Joan Pinkham [1968] (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
65 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 politics of North American avant-garde cinema when their distinctive attributes are studied within their shared biographical context.
In a crucial study on the interrelation of landscape and power, W. J. T. Mitchell writes, “Landscape might be seen more profitably as something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance.”82 My aim here is to unpack the particular technical-libidinal constellation in the “‘dreamwork’ of imperialism” saturating the landscape of northern
Canada. Consider an illustration contained in the 1950 book Atomic Bombing: How to
Protect Yourself, one of many popular press publications of the era with varying degrees of alarmist rhetoric.83 Upon a jagged foreground, we see two figures in heavy winter gear tending to an indeterminate machine. A circular base and monopod support a cross-beam slightly shorter than the central column. On each end of the cross-beam is affixed cylindrical, bucket-like objects directed upwards. A third cylinder appears to extend on a strut from the cross-beam. The apparatus is rendered so to suggest reflective metallic surfaces. Wires appear to wrap around the juncture of the monopod and cross-beam. Two additional figures appear in the far distance. One seems to pull a sled; a simple shelter is partially visible. The illustration caption reads: “Far to the north, little teams of men with strange electronic instruments stand guard —”. The simplistic rendering has little basis in
82 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, Second Edition, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10.
83 Science Service, Inc., Atomic Bombing: How To Protect Yourself (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co.: 1950), 51.
66 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the instruments actually in use at the early warning stations; it is an imaginative, colloquial rendering informed as much by de-classified World War II-era mobile radar units as the self-promotional details released by the USAF and its contractors. And it bears more than a little resemblance to the classic publicity photograph of Snow bundled in a parka beside the Camera Activating Machine, the machine planted like some kind of bizarre, robotic national flag, the North Shore a curious stand-in for the surface of the moon.
The drawing’s edge is a half circle, a dome even, broken by rays of negative space that narrow and converge on the mountainous horizon, rendered with a single rough line.
The rays are a simple perspectival short-hand by which to focus one’s attention to this
“little team” and its “strange electronic instruments.” The rays also suggest a visualization of the information that might be read by those instruments; in this way, the rays are threats, electronic signals bouncing back, a “target echo” from an in-coming object to a scope, confirmation of something over the horizon. And that information would be as strange as those instruments, a specialized, internal rhetoric. This ambivalence is also exhibited in the previously cited magazine advertisement produced by Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1959 to celebrate its military contracts. Against an ominous, black sky stands a white glowing DEW Line radome upon an elevate platform.
Light from below, out of frame, lends visibility to some of the under-workings. It is a dramatic image, pressing the distinct, luminous globe shape into iconicity. Beside the photograph the words: “The Arctic Eye That Never Sleeps.”
67 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Whose eye? What kind of eye? Might those new machines turn their “eye,” in their proclaimed ever-readiness—and promise of impending violence by nuclear weapons, long-range bombers, fighter-interceptor jets, and intercontinental ballistic missiles — and look upon us? Another slang from the airmen is illuminating here:
“SAGE popcorn” was aspirin, used to stave off headaches induced by long, interminable hours staring at the radar scopes.84 In these popular examples, two among many, we see the dreamwork of imperialism as it imagines itself with increasingly claustrophobic discourse in the loneliest corners of a closed world. These strange instruments and arctic eyes patrolled frozen deserts, and strived to extend vision into space and time. The radomes were material supports not of American omnipotent vision. Rather, they are telling in their smooth blankness. These bubbles of pearly iridescence, simultaneously fragile and impenetrable, saw only that which was admissible to their technocratic discourse. They looked to the sky, but could not reflect upon it. This “modern electronic
Paul Revere”85 (albeit in Canada) was an “inescapably self-referential space, without frontiers or escape.” The dreamwork of imperialism receded deeper into paranoiac nightmare.
In its performance of near-self-destruction, its staging of the exhaustion of cinematic representation, the CAM was much more than a machine borne of formalist
84 Miller, The Peacekeepers, 264.
85 V. B. Bagnall, “Operation DEW Line,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 259, no. 6 (June 1955): 490. Bagnall served as Projects Manager in the Defense Projects Division at Western Electric during the DEW Line construction. He continues: “Operation DEW Line has been a noteworthy example of military-civilian cooperative enterprise supplementing and supporting each other to the end that maximum use was made of the unique experience, skills, facilities of each in an urgent common endeavor.”
68 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 pursuits. Conversely, the air defense radar system was a means to dispel a fear incommensurate with its complex technical infrastructure. The simultaneous and proximal operation of the CAM and CFS Moisie give complementary views to the expansion of surveillance from discrete military applications to a pervasive condition of culture at large. Considered together, the CAM and CFS Moisie reflect larger currents of distress in the Cold War era.
6. Narcissistic System: Transcendental Subject, Closed World
For its inner-directed character, CFS Moisie may be described as a narcissistic system in a sense suggested by Marshall McLuhan in 1964. The media theorist’s comparison of art to an early warning system is widely referenced; for this study, this analogy would appear on-the-nose. More applicable is McLuhan’s ambivalent description of media drawn from the “closed system” of the Narcissus myth, in which development of new technological extensions necessarily involves a process of self-amputation, suggesting a zero-sum game: any new pressure is accompanied by a corresponding narcosis.86 “Amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception.”87 This dialectical notion of media—defined more like a phantom limb than a early warning system—may be found in a comparison of Moisie with its neighbor, the Snow-Abbeloos
Camera Activating Machine. In the CAM the fundamental contradictions of strategic air defense were literalized.
86 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 41.
87 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 43.
69 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Scholarship on La région centrale is defined by Annette Michelson’s analysis in her article “About Snow,” published in 1979 in the journal October. The critic builds upon arguments presented in her previous article “Toward Snow,” published in the June
1971 issue of Artforum. Michelson’s celebration of Snow established him as a pioneer among new critical discourses of minimalism, conceptual art, and structural filmmaking, especially determined by the New York art scene. Snow’s art was lauded by Michelson alongside the works of Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Hollis Frampton, and Yvonne
Rainer. His film Wavelength (1967) (featured on the cover of the cited issue of Artforum) was immediately received as a masterwork, awarded the top prize at the 1967
Experimental Film Festival of Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, and featured in the pages of
Film Culture magazine.88 In its execution of a basic operation of the cinematographic apparatus (the zoom action of the lens, executed in the space of Snow’s New York loft apartment for a duration of forty-five minutes), Wavelength seemed to present a sophisticated, and notorious, distillation of the most urgent concerns of reflexivity that preoccupied the new art: medium specificity, critiques of illusionism, and phenomenological experience of space and time. Already a celebrated painter in his native Toronto, this attention positioned Snow within the discourses of the American vanguard. Beyond the praise at Knokke-le-Zoute, Snow’s cinema, and Wavelength in particular, was considered for diverse arguments under rubrics of structural/materialist film by Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice, and P. Adams Sitney. Bart Testa provides a comprehensive critical survey of the literature in “An Axiomatic Cinema: Michael
88 See, for example, Film Culture 46 (Autumn 1967/October1968) and Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969).
70 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Snow’s Films.” Of particular import here is the American critical reception of Snow (a citizen of Canada), exemplified by the influential writings of Annette Michelson. Testa writes that La région centrale “represents a certain peak of Snow’s ambitions as a filmmaker, and … for Canadian cinema, it assumes the mythic stature of our first film.”89
This is a claim Testa makes earlier, in 1989, when he writes: “La région centrale is the first Canadian film. […] [T]he film is, logically and experientially, the first work of
Canadian cinema.”90 By working through Michelson’s claims for Snow and La Région
Centrale, we are better prepared to understand the stakes of reading the CAM and the film within the context of media cultures of the Cold War era.
Michelson presents a reading of La Région Centrale by way of new analyses of the cinematographic apparatus, in particular Jean-Louis Baudry’s 1970 essay “Ideological
Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Michelson argues for Snow’s film as a quintessential example of the phantasmal construction that may be found in the cinematic experience in general. For Baudry, cinema’s apparent capacity to represent images that approximate those experienced in lived reality naturalizes the dominant ideology from which it issues, prime evidence of the ideological effects of the cinematographic apparatus at work. Moreover, this ideological force is borne of the potent relation between the representations contained on the film, the institutions that produce the
89 Bart Testa, “An Axiomatic Cinema: Michael Snow’s Films,” in Presence and Absence: The Michael Snow Project: The Films of Michael Snow, 1956-1991, ed. Jim Shedden (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario/Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995), 61. See also Kathryn Elder, “Michael Snow: A Selective Guide to the Film Literature,” Presence and Absence: The Michael Snow Project: The Films of Michael Snow, 1956-1991, ed. Jim Shedden (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario/Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995), 208-249; and Elder, Image and Identity.
90 Bart Testa, “Machine in the Garden,” The Spirit in the Landscape (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1989), 61.
71 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 apparatus and motivate its use, and the person who elects to subject herself to the projection of its product. Indeed, Baudry’s point is that the prime products of the cinematographic apparatus are indoctrinated subjects, the viewers: persons who carry, in their psycho-physiological comportment, the logic of the prevailing power relations, which are elided by the imperceptibility of the celluloid passing through the projector.
For Baudry, the ideological effect of this identification with the apparatus is in its positioning of the viewer as “the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the camera which constitutes and rules the objects in the ‘world’”: “Thus the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle.”91 The viewer herself is thus instrumentalized.
Michelson follows Baudry in that the illusory capabilities of the apparatus, exhibited to such an extraordinary degree in Snow’s film, underscore the perceptual character of the cinema at large. Michelson reads Snow’s film as the case par excellence of cinema’s aspiration for total vision: “the cinematic rendering of the grand metaphor of the transcendental subject.” She emphasizes the “ultimate identification of the spectator with the camera,” depriving the spectator “of all other possible source or medium of corporeal grounding and identification”: in her phrase, “the euphoria of weightless state.”92 Michelson quotes Baudry’s “invisible base of artificial perspective” in her argument for Snow’s work: “It is, of course,” she writes, “this disembodied mobility of
91 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970), in ed. Philip Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 295.
92 Annette Michelson, “About Snow,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 111-125, here 122.
72 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the eye-subject which is hyperbolized in La Région Centrale” (italics in original).93 For
Michelson, Snow’s hyperbolization of the situation critically analyzed by Baudry becomes the summa of American avant-garde cinema. In La Région Centrale, one is free of one’s body through an illusion of expansive vision induced by the mechanical movements of the camera seemingly freed from gravitational interference by its extraordinary vehicle. Evoking the United States Apollo Mission to the moon of 1969,
Michelson writes: “Snow’s film conveys most powerfully the euphoria of the weightless state; but in a sense that is more intimate and powerful still, it extends and intensifies the traditional concept of vision as the sense through which we know and master the universe.”94 This “traditional concept of vision”—categorically condemned by Baudry as a conceit of power—is acclaimed, perhaps even with irony, as the ordering premise of La
Région Centrale. Michelson’s analysis of the film and its “disembodied mobility of the eye-subject” accrues even greater import through consultation of the apparatus that propels the camera, the Camera Activating Machine.
93 Michelson’s reference here is also Clement Greenberg in his “Modernist Painting” (1960). See Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 4, ed. John OʼBrian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85-93.
94 Michelson, “About Snow,” 121. R. Bruce Elder follows a similar notion of the transcendental subject but directs his reading toward discourses of aesthetics. He writes, “Snow’s cinema, by re-establishing a coherent space and time and by thus re-establishing a site for the transcendental subject, was for many particularly gratifying, for the sense of the transcendental subject is that of a point of stability, of an enduring centre underlying all change. […] We have, in Snow’s cinema, two subjects—a subject engrossed in the act of perception and the subject revealed through self-reflection—related to two objects of awareness, the film in flux and its hypostatized relative. The various interrelations possible between these two subjects and the two objects becomes, for Snow, an important resource to be explored. In this way, his work becomes a consideration of the varieties of aesthetic experience itself.” See Elder, Image and Identity, 255.
73 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 The apparatus that propels the camera, the attachment that makes this extraordinarily expansive vision possible, is described by Michelson as simply a “special machine designed to control a maximally mobile camera.”95 The critic’s primary concern, and the primary concern of scholars who have followed in the thirty years since the publication of “About Snow,” is the film.96 The Camera Activating Machine is left behind. However, as early as December 1970—while still editing the film at the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, four months before its first screening in
March 1971 in Toronto—Snow used the following language to describe his intentions in
La Région Centrale: “you have to be able to live with what is happening for a certain length of time in order to begin to understand it, to start to speculate with it.”97 This speculation with the film, with the apparatus, the historical conditions of its production, is elided in a celebration of the transcendental subject conceived in the projection of the film La Région Centrale, the cinematographic re-presentation of the apparatus’s effects.
In 1971, the artist stated, with what may be understood as implied resistance to P.
Adams Sitney’s recent description of Snow’s cinema as “structural”: “[My films] are experiences: real experiences even if they are representational. The structure is obviously important and one describes it because it’s more easily describable than other aspects; but
95 Michelson, “About Snow,” 119.
96 For a recent exception, see the appreciation of La Région Centrale and De La in terms of “machine vision” in Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki.
97 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 60.
74 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the shape, with all the other elements, adds up to something which can’t be said verbally and that’s why the work is, why it exists.”98
7. A Machine for Film Viewing
Snow’s first presentation of La Région Centrale at Anthology Film Archives in New York was in the form of a 12-minute segment on April 4 and 18, 1971. At that time, Anthology was located at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street.99 Just a few months prior, in November 1970, the theater had been transformed into the Invisible Cinema, for the purpose of producing “optimal viewing conditions,” “at once communal and extremely concentrated.”100 The Invisible Cinema was a “machine for film viewing.”101
As designed by Peter Kubelka and built by Giorgio Cavaglieri, the Cinema’s ceiling, walls, and seats were cloaked in black velvet; black carpet covered the floors, and all else in black paint. Each of the ninety seats featured a hood and blinders. “There was a feeling of being in the dark mother’s womb from which one would then be born into another world, the world of the film.”102 The Invisible Cinema was to close down a viewers’
98 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58.
99 The advertisement postcard for Snow’s screenings gives the location as “Film Anthology Cinema.” Anthology Film Archives, founded by James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, and P. Adams Sitney, emerged from the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Snow Fonds, box 10, file 5.
100 P. Adams Sitney, “Introduction,” The Essential Cinema: Essays on the films in the collection of Anthology Film Archives, ed. P. Adams Sitney, with Caroline Sergeant Angell (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975), vii-x.
101 Peter Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” Design Quarterly 93 (1974): 35.
102 Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” 34.
75 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 attention wholly to the screen, their sole “guide to scale and distance.”103 The hood and blinder configurations were “similar to hearing devices used in the Second World War,”
Kubelka noted, referring to parabolic ears. “They were simulations of big ears which concentrated the sound coming in directly from the screen and subdued sounds coming from other directions in the room, thereby creating a maximum of silence within which the sound from the film would be undiluted.”104 As Andrew Uroskie describes, this ideal of cinema was contingent upon specific discourses of artistic modernism, and its materialization at this historical conjuncture was fraught with the coexistence of experiments following more capacious, hybrid definitions of the cinema. Film’s ascendence to respectability, to “Art,” on a premise of medium specificity would be supported by a regulation of the spectatorial body within the theatrical space. This discipling found its “hyperbolic literalization” in the Invisible Cinema. Indeed, Kubelka’s project “might seem a caricature of this idea of spectatorial discipline if it had not been intended in all seriousness.”105 And serious he was, conceiving the Invisible Cinema with absolute intolerance of “multi-media, multi-screen, multiple speakers or for action mixed with film,” the defining characteristics of the nascent expanded cinema projects.106 The
Invisible Cinema was a site of overdetermination in the extreme, an environment of unambiguous, explicit control. It concretized a particular aspiration for the ideal
103 Sitney, “Introduction,” vii.
104 Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” 32.
105 Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 44.
106 Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” 34.
76 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 conditions of cinematic experience, a pure transportation “into another world, the world of the film,” spurned on by an anxiety of adulteration of the cinema.107 In this way, the
Invisible Cinema was an actualization of the illusory conceit described by Baudry, and in the most literal, brutalist terms: an interruption of motoricity in favor of regression:
“Return effect, repetition of a phase of the subject’s development during which representation and perception were not yet differentiated, and the desire to return to that state along with the kind of satisfaction associated with it, undoubtedly an archetype for all that which seeks to connect with the multiple paths of the subject’s desire. It is indeed desire as such, i.e. desire of desire, the nostalgia for a state in which desire has been satisfied through the transfer of a perception to a formation resembling hallucination, which seems to be activated by the cinematographic apparatus.”108
Baudry concluded, “One cannot hesitate to insist on the artificial character of the cine-subject. … The entire cinematographic apparatus,” a process of psychophysical determination, “is activated in order to provoke this simulation: it is indeed a simulation of a condition of the subject, a position of the subject, a subject and not a reality.”109 Yet, as Kubelka admitted, “since there was not a complete partition, you always felt there was someone on your side.”110 This interrelation of isolated reception and uncanny communal presence were the circumstances by which La Région Centrale was first introduced to
107 Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” 32.
108 Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema” (1976), in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 314.
109 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 316.
110 Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” 34.
77 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 audiences of New York—in a 12 minute excerpt, no less—the environment so crucial to its critical reception.111 Indeed, the Invisible Cinema would seem to be the necessary condition for readings of La Région Centrale as a metaphor for the transcendental subject.
For P. Adams Sitney, the apparently disembodied, inhuman perspective of the camera became evidence of omniscience: “a paradox of vision where there is no person to do the seeing - as if the lens were God’s eye, or the eye of time.”112 La Région
Centrale, he concluded, is a metaphor for “the Romantic estrangement from nature; all of its baroque motions vainly seek an image in the visible central region that will illuminate the invisible one.”113 Snow proposed that La Région Centrale “will feel like a record of the last wilderness on earth, a film to be taken into outer space as a souvenir of what nature once was. I want to convey a feeling of absolute aloneness, a kind of Goodbye to
Earth which I believe we are living through.”114 Snow reflected recently that his allusions
111 La Région Centrale screened in its entirety at Anthology Film Archives on January 19, 1972. In his Village Voice interview with Snow on the film, Jonas Mekas describes the film having its first public screening (in New York) on January 19 at Anthology, with a “wider public opening” to follow at the Elgin Theatre on February 17. Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice (January 27, 1972), 65.
112 P. Adams Sitney, “Michael Snow’s Cinema” (1969, revised 1972), in The Essential Cinema, 227.
113 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 358.
114 Snow, “La Région Centrale,” Collected Writings, 56.
78 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 to environmental concerns were an attempt to capitalize on the attention and financial support available to work engaging such concerns at the end of the 1960s.115
The Invisible Cinema, itself a kind of extreme version of this estrangement, underscored the poignant release induced by Snow’s film. For Michelson the film hyperbolized mastery of vision in its “cinematic rendering of the grand metaphor of the transcendental subject.”116 One is free of one’s body, she claimed, through an illusion of expansive vision induced by the mechanical movements of the camera seemingly freed from gravitational interference by its extraordinary vehicle. While the Invisible Cinema materialized the ideal viewing conditions for film on terms of suspended mobility, La région centrale was received in a sense as an ideal counterpart, its “extended mobility” in rival to the accomplishments in “dominant cinema” by Max Ophüls, Orson Welles, and
Stanley Kubrick.117 La région centrale seemed fit to the measure of cinema as modern art, a worthy complement to the medium’s established luminaries. The film “extends and intensifies the traditional concept of vision as the sense through which we know and master the universe,” Michelson wrote.118
As the “machine for film viewing” strived to eliminate all distractions, so the
CAM in turn was “released” from close consideration. The screening space, devised as a
115 Snow, interview with the author, December 5, 2012, Toronto. La Région Centrale was included in the 2012 exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
116 Annette Michelson, “About Snow,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 122.
117 Michelson, “About Snow,” 121.
118 Michelson, “About Snow,” 121.
79 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 dark isolation chamber, sloughed away anything but cinema conceived in an essential form, the film’s hyperbolized mastery of vision was contingent upon disavowal of the material conditions of its production—a disavowal which seemed to slip into its reverse.
Michelson memorably reflected that the Invisible Cinema was “conceived as a means of sacralization of the filmic object and essential in the conception of a temple for the ritual celebration of cinema as an artistic practice.” This sacralization “had, from the first, alternatively suggested this structure as an ideally appropriate site for the viewing of pornographic film.”119 In Michelson’s linking of sacralization and pornography on the ground of the quintessential project of cinema as modern art, we find a complex technical-libidinal relation reminiscent of Baudry’s aforementioned suspension of motoricity, the induction of regression. The tension is rendered especially palpable in
Brakhage’s recollection about watching his own film in The Invisible Cinema: “The minute they tell me I can't pee, for example, I suddenly have the sensation that I have to.
If you get up and leave, you can't get back in. So, there you are, parted between the vision you are seeing and bodily functions. Quite a strain I thought, in that sense.”120
The Invisible Cinema was an elaborate architecture of discipline; the unfettered vision of the CAM, in kind, was bolted to the ground with a cubic meter of cement. As the CAM induces sensations of transcendental release, its hardware presses in equal and opposite measure, pulling us back to its contingent circumstances. The sensory effect
119 Annette Michelson, “Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia,” October 83 (Winter 1998): 5.
120 Stan Brakhage, in Sky Sitney, “The Search for the Invisible Cinema,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005): 111.
80 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 produced by the recorded images is in tension with the means of their production. We are set into a device whose operations welcomes the fantasy of disembodiment while underscoring that apparent split of psyche and soma: “ecstasy and analysis,” in Snow’s words.121 Through the course of the film, we see the CAM continuously re-inscribe its incapacity, as an extension of our incapacity to induce a world-view beyond that determined by its builders. The entire film is “made by the machinery (you?). There are no other people but you (the machinery?) and the extraordinary wilderness. Alone.”
Snow’s “you?/machinery?” insertions underscore this rich ambivalence between suspension, stricture, and its release, states of excitation and euphoria articulated through shared terms—this regression and mobility. Recall that Snow “only looked through the camera once. The film was made by the planning and the machinery itself.”122 The following section will endeavor to explicate the libidinal character of this process, this
“planning and machinery,” this carnal knowledge.
8. Come and Get High, Get High and Come: Film as Carnal Knowledge
In autumn 1970, Snow edited La Région Centrale while a visiting artist at the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. He began to draft advertising copy for the film. In one instance, below center-justified upper-case text of the title in
French and English, and his name, he wrote: “Come and get high, Get high and come.”123
121 Snow, “Michael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation,” The Collected Writings, 226.
122 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58, 61, and 62.
123 Snow Fonds, 10-5.
81 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 It is a clear pun on common euphemisms for drug-induced altered states and libidinal pleasure, here associated to the act of attending a screening of La Région Centrale.
Snow’s wordplay follow and precede many instances of sexually-explicit material and puns on sex acts throughout his career. They assist our understanding of the technical- libidinal character of his efforts in the Camera Activating Machine (De La) and La
Région Centrale. Such character may appear superficially absent from these works.
However, under closer scrutiny in their context, we find a fundamental link to the obsessive desires propelling Cold War nuclear defense infrastructures, to which, as we have seen, the CAM is materially related. As the air defense radar operators were “always getting excited” for the possibility of mortal threat entering their scopes, Snow sought to position his audience in “the ecstatic centre of a complete sphere” by means of the
CAM.124 In the context of Cold War nuclear defense, there was a dark, disturbing edge to the excitement generated through these devices.
In December 1970, in the NSCAD Lithography Workshop, Snow produced a two- color lithograph entitled Projection. First exhibited at the school, it appeared with the
CAM in About 30 Works by Michael Snow. Projection depicts Snow’s well-known
Walking Woman cutout figure. While Snow had ostensibly ceased work with the Walking
Woman in 1967 for the Montreal Expo, the figure is recognizable here in uniform black against a midnight-blue field. It is cropped more than in most iterations, cut below the shoulder and above the knee. The dimensions of the photographed Walking Woman are apparently life-size. This presumption of size follows the presence of a nude male torso at
124 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58.
82 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 right, similarly cropped and facing the Walking Woman, his fingers visible at the cutout’s back, embracing the figure and holding it in place. The erect penis of the man, in clear focus at low-center of the composition, appears to penetrate the Walking Woman. His back is arched, rhyming with that of the cutout figure, further accentuating the centrality of his penis to the composition. Snow wrote at the time, “Projection is just a blow-up. It is printed on black with white ink as white light. I thought this was like the way you see a film image on a screen, where there is no light in the dark parts. That was the way to use the blow-up, originally a movie image. The phallic image also relates to film projection; it’s a pun but it’s also true.”125
Projection plays between the suggestion of heterosexual intercourse or rather the masturbatory fantasy of a man and a cutout figure, and the use of the Walking Woman as the ground against the privileged figure of the male genital organ. Like an x-ray, suggested in the lithograph’s blue-black color, we see “through” the Walking Woman to the penetrating organ. The title, a pun on “projection” of the tumescent penis crossed with
“projection” in a technological sense of motion picture media suggested in the aspect ratio of the lithograph, also suggests “projection” of artificial perspectival space on a flat surface generated by means of tonal contrast. “Projection” is of course also suggestive of the circuit of desire, the attribution of fantasies to a object: “just a blow-up” doll as much as a photographic enlargement.
125 Michael Snow, “16. Projection,” About 30 Works by Michael Snow, catalogue to the exhibition (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1972), 23.
83 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 In 1969 when Simon Hartog asked Snow, “why is [Wavelength] 46 minutes long?” Snow first replied, “Nice fuck.”126 Snow initially considered ending Wavelength not with a photograph of ocean waves, but with “a crotch shot” at the juncture of a woman’s legs, her limbs rhyming with the orthogonals of the loft apartment’s floorboards in a sexually charged turn on perspectival order.127 Here Snow takes inspiration from perhaps Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), or Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946-1966)—which Snow may have seen on his visit to Duchamp’s studio in
1962.128 Among many possible titles for his film, Snow considered Cunt-Room, The
Cuntempla[tion Room], Wet Room Time, Thy [“Thigh”] Length, Amy’s Entrance, and The
Throat, before settling on Wavelength. Masturbation was among the first actions he hypothesized he would direct a female actor (Amy Taubin) to make in the film.129 At the same time, regarding La Région Centrale, in a pre-production note on possible directional commands for the CAM, Snow considered having it trace “(human) female body hills.”130 He also considered the inclusion of actions, possibly taken by the CAM’s human operators, evocative of classic art-historical composition and scenarios from the imaginary of the sexual revolution. He writes, “people action will be enacted at moment of very slow speed for maximum ‘legibility’ and at highest speeds for almost complete
126 Simon Hartog, “Ten Questions to Michael Snow” (1969), in Peter Gidal, ed. Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976), 36.
127 Elizabeth Legge, Michael Snow: Wavelength (London: Afterall, 2009), 59.
128 Michael Snow, “Admission (or, Marcel Duchamp)” (1989), Collected Writings, 286-289.
129 Snow Fonds, box 11, file 2.
130 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
84 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 abstraction./ Nudes in landscape/ people go to river, take off clothes go for swim frolic sunbathe, fuck?”131 The “people action” was to follow, in part, a play by Richard
Foreman, the creator of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Following a rough-cut screening of La Région Centrale for a NSCAD audience, Snow excised all “people action,” a section totaling approximately thirty minutes. In Snow’s original conception of the CAM, he wished for a gyroscopic apparatus that would spin himself—a home-made aerotrim, spinning him into ecstatic disequilibrium.132 Remnants of this idea persisted in
Snow’s somersaulting around the CAM on-site in Sept-Îles. While the footage containing the CAM’s record of the human operators is now lost, Snow’s tumbling may be seen in
Wieland’s photographs from the shoot. At one point, Snow imagined directing the CAM to follow a path determined by cursive-script spelling of his last name: Snow’s audience would see the landscape through his signature upon it.133
Further evidence from Snow’s production notes may be correlated to events in the completed film itself. Snow wrote directions for the CAM including, double-underlined,
“QUIVERS AND SHIVERS,” and elsewhere, “VIBRATIONS.”134 In the first reel a scanning motion is emphasized as the camera’s lens points upward to an uniform blue field of sky; one meditates on the electronic pulses of the soundtrack, awaiting some
131 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
132 Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012. As we shall see, Snow’s wish to spin himself into a dizzy high by means of an elaborate machine anticipates my discussion of Tom Sherman’s work, in particular Hyperventilation (1970) and ganzfeld action (1975), following in Chapter Four.
133 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
134 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
85 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 visual reference point by which to make a relational judgment of position. Correlation is established between the pulsing tones and alterations in the camera’s action. Our attention is focused not so much on the swirling landscape as the workings of the camera’s mobility by means of its seemingly knee-jerk reflex to stimulation from the tones. The tones seem to force the camera into new positions and paths. We encounter a catalog of the CAM’s possible movements, including rapid somersault pans and figure-eight patterns, in a reflexive, muscular character. In reel three, for example, a throbbing action traces not the crest of the mountains in the far distance, rather strokes up and down in time to higher-pitched tones, increasing in speed as dusk falls and the landscape becomes increasingly indistinguishable. With great care and labor, Snow strived to synch the tones and the movements as closely as possible. Simultaneous synchronization being mechanically impossible, as noted earlier, Snow’s copious edit lists attest to his meticulous control of the image and soundtrack.135 We find investment not in cinema-as- such, but in vision as a technical-libidinal process. “Wavelength was an iris-opener shaping the amount and type of light given to the eyes,” Snow wrote. “But the course of my work has led me to LRC which is more like eye weight-lifting! Its muscular.”136 La région centrale directs the given capabilities of the assemblage of cinematographic apparatuses, such as the throbbing actions described, so to amplify the base impulsions to vision itself.
135 Snow Fonds, box 9, file 6.
136 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 63.
86 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 What is extrapolated from the sexually charged material in contemporaneous projects, drafts and production notes, and in the completed film, is the eroticism of the apparatuses themselves. Snow works through possible articulations of the psychophysical effects he hoped to induce, a kind of libidinal engineering. The erect penis of Projection has its counterpart in the frenetic action of the CAM in La région centrale. The implied act in the former, explicit still image becomes the explicit act implied in the moving image of the latter. In viewing La région centrale, Snow wished his audience to experience, in their own psychophysiological comportment, the libidinous effects of motion-picture illusory space, amplified by high velocity looping actions, intensified by actual, optical projection. In 1971 and 1972, Snow ordered postcards with which to advertise screenings of La région centrale in New York and Toronto. In brief copy on the postcard, he described the film as “the message from a rotating body.”137 This language would be reiterated by a crucial advocate for the film, Annette Michelson.
In her essay on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), “Bodies in
Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,” Michelson wrote that Kubrick’s film posits “a space which, overflowing screen and field of vision, converts the theatre into a vessel and its viewers into passengers, it impels us, in the movement from departure to arrival, to rediscover the space and dimensions of the body as theatre of consciousness.” We revel, she concluded, in “a knowledge which is carnal.”138 Michelson would draw on this sentiment in her analysis of Snow’s film, in particular comparing A Space Odyssey’s
137 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 5.
138 Annette Michelson, “Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge” (1969), in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. Stephanie Schwam (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 215.
87 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 famed “star gate” climax to La région centrale and the extreme propulsive forces employed for its depiction of the Quebec landscape. Noting that La Région Centrale
“followed the most intensive period of America’s space program, culminating in the fulfillment of the Apollo Mission,” she summed, “La région centrale gives new meaning to the notion of science fiction.”139 Indeed, Snow imagined that the effect of the CAM’s movements would evoke something like “the first rigorous filming of the moon surface.”140 Snow appears to have taken inspiration from advertising copy for A Space
Odyssey for his own work: A Space Odyssey, “the ultimate trip,” became La région centrale, the “cosmic strip.”141 Snow describes the CAM as an apparatus that, “once it is set up it keeps on going”; “it just goes on without us.”142As we have seen, similar rhetoric was motivated on behalf of the purported automatic control capabilities Cold War nuclear defense systems. By the mid-1960s that rhetoric was the subject of dark parody. Indeed, the particular circumstances of Snow’s epic may be more effectively contextualized alongside not A Space Odyssey, but an earlier Kubrick film: Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
In Dr. Strangelove, rhetorics of containment receive a hilariously bleak, and grotesquely libidinal, representation. Brigadier General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) initiates a pre-emptive nuclear strike upon the USSR to preserve his “precious bodily fluids.” The most catastrophic programs are commandeered in the service of paranoiac
139 Michelson, “About Snow,” 121-123.
140 Snow, “La Région Centrale,” Collected Writings, 56.
141 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 58.
142 Snow, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale,” 60 and 63.
88 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 fears of impotence. The elaborate safe-guards for the American nuclear arsenal result not in control but in incapacitation: game theory forecloses on the populations it is meant to protect. The film argues that the severe order of nuclear science is indistinguishable from the fits of paroxysmal fascist salutes erupting from Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers). The complement to Snow’s “message from a rotating body” is not Keir Dullea as Dr. David
Bowman in A Space Odyssey, nor the spacewalks by the Apollo 11 astronauts the following year, but rather Slim Pickens, the famed Western character actor as Major T.J.
“King” Kong in an ecstatic rodeo ride on a nuclear warhead to its target, the film’s climax of extreme velocity and total destruction. Through Dr. Strangelove, we see that the difference between the sublimity of an aerotrim and a nuclear warhead is a matter of limited degrees.
In the series of documentary nuclear test detonations that follows, we find a perpetual re-staging of the end of the world set to Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet
Again”—illustration par excellence of a grim, and seductive, compulsion to repeat. In the narrative of Dr. Strangelove, “King” Kong’s bronco ride triggers this series of apocalyptic explosions by the Soviet doomsday device, which had its real-life complement in the
Soviet Perimeter system begun in 1974. Perimeter was a “dead hand” device: a fully automated deployment of weapons of mass destruction, “a lethal machine that haunts the globe long after the demise of the men who created it.”143 Or, to recall Snow’s words, a system “that just goes on without us.” What is dark and only marginally speculative
143 David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Anchor, 2009), 24, see also 152-154 and 421-423; and Schlosser, Command and Control, 467-468.
89 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 narrative in Dr. Strangelove becomes the frenetic, obsessive operations of the CAM in La région centrale. Gene Youngblood, writing to Snow in 1971 after seeing an excerpt of La région centrale, understood the humor of this disturbing ambivalence: “I’ve always felt that I was the center of the Universe but I had no proof until I saw La région centrale.
Now let them laugh. The only problem is that everyone else who saw it at the same time said they were the center.”144 Following our examination of the related servomechanical technologies in the CAM and the air defense radar network, we find in Dr. Strangelove another key example in a constellation of technical-libidinal operations, a kind of perverse love for technological workings, across key sectors of Cold War media cultures.
Indeed, Michelson’s analysis of Snow’s “carnal knowledge” may have been more correct than she initially imagined.
9. De la
In 1963, soon after arriving in New York with Wieland, Snow began production of film that included Duchamp. While this particular, direct collaboration was left unfinished,
Snow’s intellectual relation to the legacy of Duchamp has been widely articulated, not least by Michelson. Snow has benefitted from academic reevaluations of the historical avant-garde and the promotion of Duchamp as a key figure in those accounts.145 In
144 Gene Youngblood, letter to Michael Snow, April 9, 1971. Snow Fonds, box 47, file 4. Quoted in David Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki, 119.
145 See, of course, Michelson, “About Snow,” as well as R. Bruce Elder, “Michael Snow’s Presence,” in Presence and Absence: The Michael Snow Project: The Films of Michael Snow, 1956-1991, ed. Jim Shedden (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario/Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995), 94-139); Thierry de Duve, “Michael Snow: The Deictics of Experience, and Beyond,” in Parachute 78 (April/May/June 1995): 29-41; and Cornwell, Snow Seen.
90 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 regards to La région centrale, we find evidence of this relation in Snow’s mapping of the actions of the CAM as seismographic charts of the speed and direction of the machine correlative to the psychophysical excitement to be generated in the viewer; we can recall, for instance, the central presence of the pulse-needle, “vibrating and ventilating the sex cylinder,” in Duchamp’s Large Glass. Further, Snow writes in his production notes for one movement, “TOTAL SPIN,” alongside a swiftly marked spiral occupying most of the paper page, evoking no less than Duchamp’s Anemic Cinéma (1926).146 This relation is especially acute in Snow’s revision of the Camera Activating Machine into the kinetic sculpture De la.
In January 1971, following their return to Montreal, Snow directed Abbeloos to replace the 16-mm camera with a closed-circuit video system. Abbeloos made the alteration in cooperation with Astro Electronics and RCA Limited of Montreal, a local outfit of the renowned American defense contractor specializing in television-equipped aerospace technologies. RCA Astro Electronics was a leading developer of satellite technologies. Two of it major accomplishments came in the 1960s with the Television
Infra-Red Observation Satellite (TIROS) series and the Defense Meteorological Satellite
Program (DMSP). RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) was one of the earliest beneficiaries of military contracts in radar technology.147 Abbeloos also added a motion-sensor and a thirty-minute cycle of movements. Snow’s initial sketches for the
146 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 7.
147 See Louis Brown, Technical and Military Imperatives: A Radar History of World War II (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 22-23; Leonard, History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, Volume 1: 1945-1955, 230; Bruce-Briggs, Shield of Faith, 102-103.
91 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 alteration called for five monitors: the fifth suspended above the machine, its screen aimed downward.148 In the four CRT monitors—and in the proposed fifth, one imagines a heavy sky, radiating its cool glow—we find a neat corollary to the radar scopes of the distant early warning stations at CFS Moisie and its kin. A mise-en-abyme was created: a self-directed electronic matrix, a narcissistic system, implied in the celluloid record of the machine’s operation in Central Quebec, now actualized into a chattering implosion upon the psycho-physiological infrastructure of the viewing subject. RCA Astro provided lubricant so to reduce noise made by the machine when active; a capacitor would have reduced noise considerably, but if added the device would have obstructed the video image.149 As previously noted, the CAM was exhibited under the title From/De la région centrale at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1971, then—as De la—to the
Center for Inter-American Relations in New York in 1972, where it accompanied screenings of the film. De la traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum in 1979 and to the List
Visual Arts Center at MIT in 1986.
Snow’s remarks on De La are some of his most fragmentary and elusive: “The
T.V. image is magic: even though it is in real time; simultaneous, it is a ghost of the actual events which one is, in this case, part of. The machine that is orchestrating these ghost images is never seen in them: it belongs exclusively to the ‘real’ side of the equation.”150
The servo drives of the artist’s machine and the real time capability of its camera belongs
148 Snow Fonds, box 10, file 6.
149 Abbeloos, interview with the author, August 22, 2012, Montreal.
150 Snow, “De La,” 81.
92 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 to the “‘real’ side of the equation.” This is opposed to the “ghost images” of the television monitor; that is to say, the images of the viewer. The viewer is caught between the real and its representation. The dynamic of image capture here is different than in works by
Dan Graham, Peter Campus, or Bruce Nauman where one is disoriented by the dissonant play of reflexivity with one’s own televisual image.151 In De la, the spectator is fixated on the spectacle of a machine, its movements, in which one’s “self” appears as but a fleeting blur. In De la we are confronted with the condition of our metaphorical, transcendental
“deliverance”: we see that it is precisely—only—a machine, churning and spinning. The machine continues to spin, first next to CFS Moisie and the most advanced military surveillance technology of the day, then alongside a museum audience, the potential subjects of that culture of control, the surveyed and atomized statistics of a totally administered society. The subject-effect of this cinematographic apparatus is one of ecstasy, ecstasis, ἔκστασις: through the apparatus’s effect upon our sensory faculties we are impelled to stand outside ourselves. Cornwell writes on La région centrale, “If one tragedifies nature in order to show its ‘otherness’ from man, one ironically anthropomorphizes it. […] One does not see the surface of a landscape, but only those curvatures which are like a human face—nature becomes one huge Mt. Rushmore.”152
What if that compulsion to anthropomorphize is directed to a person—via live, closed- circuit video—no less than oneself amongst the machines? What if one is asked to see
151 For more on the critical reception of Snow’s “screen-reliant art,” see Kate Mondloch, “The matter of illusionism: Michael Snow’s screen/space,” in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary art, ed. Tamara Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 73-89. See also Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
152 Cornwell, Snow Seen, 122.
93 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 one’s face “like” a face? The viewer becomes the “landscape” surveilled. Snow’s means for an “absolute record of a piece of wilderness” is turned upon the wilderness of the viewer who might dare to enter its matrix of whirling camera and four podiums, topped with televisions whose screens aim back at the apparatus.
The viewer is now the ground supposedly transcended in La région centrale, charted and surveyed by “circles within circles and cycles within cycles” on vertical and horizontal axes at varying speeds. One is thereby relegated to “unrecognizable flat surface,” to recall Victoria Schultz’s description of the film. The video camera smears our reflection as it passes us: the instantaneity of our image’s transmission is destabilized by the machine of its delivery. The increasingly pervasive culture of technocracy and surveillance is exemplified in the CAM’s closing of a circuit between one’s vision, both directed back to oneself and obliterated by its process of capture. Here recall Snow’s original research for the CAM in surveillance technologies manufactured by Pelco
Industries and Abbeloos’s basis for its construction in precision ranging systems: radar adapted to become the target of its own sensor. In De la we confront a profound antagonism that formulates the impossibility of its own coming into being. This transformation, implied in fleeting moments of abstraction in La région centrale, is now asserted as the work’s primary operation. It is the audience members who must now reckon with their inconsequentiality, as defined by their frail image, in this closed world.
Subject becomes object of intensive regard: narcissism hyperbolized.
As the SAGE operators were prone to suffer hypnosis induced by their CRT scopes, viewers beholding De La come under a kind of hypnosis—induced by their own
94 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 image, generated and transmuted by this fantastical machine in a fine entrapment of one’s desire to see beyond: over the horizon, into the future. Recall, for example, that
Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
(1915-1923) had a “kind of subtitle: Delay in Glass,” an “indecisive reunion” of apparently contradictory notions.153 The Large Glass “allegorizes the introjection of a mechanized mind within an already mechanized body,” representing an “irrational psychic machine, fueled on desire.”154 We obtain a “hypophysical/ analysis of the successive transformations/ of objects”—here, the objects reduced to something other than physical matter are viewers themselves.155 We find here, then, two more bachelor machines: The Camera Activating Machine and CFS Moisie, spinning in tandem, revelatory beyond their declared mission, enacting the desire at work in their conception, their shared processes of action. CFS Moisie: “hardly even a surveillance station, without control capability” yet its airmen were vigilant to its radar arrays for thirty-five years. The precision ranging system-turned-Camera Activating Machine: better known by means of its filmic product, yet its ultimate techno-physiological circuit awaits completion by viewers, awaits their movements, their shadows, to enter the range of its motion sensor— provided by RCA Limited, a premier Cold War defense contractor. De la: a proposition and a feminine definite article: “of the,” or “from the,” a determiner of an unknown amount: perhaps some, perhaps any—an indecisive reunion.
153 Marcel Duchamp, “The Green Box” (1934), in: Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 26.
154 David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 112.
155 Marcel Duchamp, “Cast Shadows,” Writings, 72.
95 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015
Coda: Si invisum non invisum
The invisibility of the Camera Activating Machine, its particular history and its context, has persisted in the literature on Michael Snow and La région centrale. De La has been left wanting for consideration though it is one of the earliest and most ambitious uses of closed-circuit video by an artist. The ostensible absence of the machine in the pro-filmic space of La région centrale (the pervasive appearance of its shadow notwithstanding) has turned into a kind of passing aside, uncritically repeated at the expense of the extraordinary feat of its engineering based in military precision ranging systems. In this case study I sought to look upon the source of that shadow, and the landscape of Quebec that it occupied for five days in September 1970—the landscape that was something else than empty. The crest of Canadian Forces Radar Squadron 211, the unit in residence at
CFS Moisie, bears the Latin phrase Si invisum non invisum: “If it is an enemy, it must not go unobserved.”
96 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 3.
Meat System in Köln:
Carolee Schneemann and the Electronic Activation Room
1. Studies for testing energy
From Meat Joy of 1964 to Meat System of 1970, the work of Carolee Schneemann intensified in its technical-libidinal character. This study describes that development by examination of two works: Lateral Splay, a performance first made in 1963 with the
Judson Dance Theater, and Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, a multimedia environment produced in 1970 for the exhibition Happening & Fluxus at the Kölnischer
Kunstverein. Close reading of these works, following the demands of the historical record, complicates prevailing accounts of Schneemann’s work based primarily on discourses of identity, corporeality, and so-called body art. While not dismissing the importance of these interpretations, this examination of Lateral Splay and the Electronic
Activation Room aims to revise our understanding of Schneemann’s work and the particular import of its feminism. It will do so on the grounds of then-contemporary discourses in applied physics, cybernetics, and industrial psychology during the intensification of the Cold War, especially the American escalation of the Vietnam War.
This revision may be extended to even her most notorious body-centric performance,
Interior Scroll (1975).
Consider the first preparatory drawing Schneemann made for Interior Scroll, dated June 22, 1974, and published in Schneemann’s artist book Cézanne, She Was a
97 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Great Painter (1975). We see a rendering of the action the artist will make in its two public formulations at the exhibition Women Here & Now in East Hampton, New York, on August 29, 1975, and at the Telluride Film Festival, in Telluride, Colorado, on
September 4, 1977: a series of poses expressing an arch ritualism and mocking challenge to the submissive role of the live nude female model. While posing, Schneemann removes a scroll of paper from her vagina from which she reads a statement of protest against the exclusion of women, and especially herself, from American experimental film culture. Also on the drawing we see two words, underlined: “the message.”
Schneemann’s notation in the work’s first articulation suggests that it be considered not only within the discourses of performance and experimental cinema, in particular the increasingly pervasive work in redefinition of theatrical organization collected under the rubric “expanded cinema.” But also, with equal pressure, among a larger context of theories of communication pervasive at that time, in particular that of Marshall McLuhan and his famous dictum “the medium is the message.”
By exploration of the historical context in which Lateral Splay, the Electronic
Activation Room, and Interior Scroll appeared, we may ascertain the artist’s incorporation and transformation of media cultures in which she participated. As we shall see,
Schneemann’s process of incorporation and transformation must be understood with and against art historical discourses as well as more popular discourses of electronic media.
Indeed, Schneemann’s engagement was selective and particular, a sophisticated admixture that actively resisted disciplinary conventions to which one may wish it to hew. This complex dynamic will be traced through Schneemann’s activity concurrent
98 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 with the asserted works, and clarified through contextualization alongside contemporaneous multimedia projects by other artists, such as Robert Whitman’s Prune.
Flat. (1965), Wolf Vostell’s Electronic dé-coll/age, Happening Room (1968), and the
Pepsi Pavilion (1970) produced by the organization Experiments in Art and Technology
(EAT) for Expo 70 in Osaka. These analyses will be set in broader social and political contexts of the era, most especially American escalation of the Vietnam War and the so- called “sexual revolution,” especially in the person of Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich. In these ways, I underscore the aggressive ambivalence of Schneemann’s technical-libidinal operations, what I am calling libidinal engineering.
On September 9, 1970, in London, while in the midst of producing the Electronic
Activation Room, Schneemann wrote on expanded cinema: “we were expanded cinema cinema mythos living act living out art act synapse turned fragile flash frame motion out of our spines—out of our heads! …”1 Schneemann makes an important distinction in these poetic remarks. “We”—herself, her colleagues, her audience—were expanded cinema: that is, not necessarily a discrete technology or its application, rather, a network of technical-libidinal operations inclusive of the fraught implications of bodies and machines. Schneemann’s words, especially her association of psychophysiological with photochemical processes, would seem on point with the definition of expanded cinema-
1 Carolee Schneemann, “EXPANDED CINEMA: Free Form Recollections of New York” (1970), in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, eds. A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis (London: Tate, 2011), 95. Emphasis in original.
99 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 as-expanded consciousness given by Gene Youngblood, a supporter of Schneemann’s earlier work.2
However, in contrast, we find in the artist’s writings and work an increasing alarm at the habituated systems of determination still firmly entrenched, notwithstanding purported innovations in media technology. Schneemann’s critical acumen would reach new sophistication in the Electronic Activation Room. Andrew Uroskie argues that a broader historical view is necessitated so to underscore the sophisticated, contradictory, and often deliberately contrarian, innovations found in expanded cinema. In a similar mode of historical investigation, I am arguing for Schneemann’s Meat System within a longer, complex history of controlled environments. Cogent here are discourses of industrial psychology from the 1920s.
In 1970 Schneemann made a collage entitled Testing Energy, which was subsequently published on the cover of the poetry magazine Earth Star Ship. The man on the left is the American industrial psychologist Donald Laird, who was based at Cornell from the 1920s through the 1940s. In Laird’s tests, typists produced the same standard letter over and over again in two-hour sessions. The breathing apparatus measured the typists’ caloric expenditure. Within the custom-built ten by ten-foot test chamber, the typists were assaulted by drones of varying intensity, up to 1,500 vibrations per second.
Laird hoped to determine the decibel levels at which the typists were most efficient. Laird wrote, “Our working hypothesis is that ‘noise’ serves as a natural stimulus to the fear-
2 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), 41.
100 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 reaction.”3 Laird’s editor observed, “the special value of [Laird’s] communication lies in the description of the experimental methods he is employing.”4 For Schneemann, the
“special value” of Laird’s communication lies in his bald display of patriarchal imposition upon his female typist. Recall Weaver’s attempt to modulate Eve. As Friedrich
Kittler would later observe, “The technical simulation of both optical and acoustical processes presupposed analyses made possible by the speed of the apparatuses themselves.”5 In this tautology, Schneemann uncovers a useful reversal: the power assumed and advertised by the psychologist become exactly the terms of the photograph’s evisceration by the artist. A fear-reaction was indeed successfully induced in
Schneemann, and in her collage we see her retort. Laird aspired to make administrative assistants more efficient for their male managers. Now he observes chaos.
The potential violence in the matter of communication, in the conveyance technology itself even, or especially, when the technology was attributed with responsive or interactive capabilities, was as much at stake as the content of their bombardment. This distinguishes the work from, for example, ostensible precedents in the culture of expanded cinema such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows by Andy Warhol and the
Velvet Underground (1966-67) and their “disruptive multiplicity.”6 Another would be
Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome (1963-66). While VanDerBeek retained some of his
3 Donald A. Laird, “Experiments on the Physiological Cost of Noise,” The Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology 4, no. 5 (January 1929): 254.
4 Charles S. Myers and Margaret K. Horsey, Industrial Psychology, 251.
5 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1985), trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 229.
6 Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 81.
101 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 utopic aspiration in his multi-projection space, Schneemann and Lifton forced a confrontation between a viewer and the projectors, sound system, and computers, that made possible their images and sounds. Further contrast between contemporaneous multimedia environments may be found by consideration of Pepsi Pavilion in Expo 70 by
Experiments in Art and Technology, spearheaded by Billy Klüver, Schneemann’s former associate.
The present study concerns the compulsion from which this relation was formed, its process, its violence, as it was worked through in Schneemann’s art, in particular Meat
System 1: Electronic Activation Room. In this work Schneemann explored, by means of a range of media, the contingency of claims to the “automatic,” and the desire at work in claims to “control.” Schneemann took on the process of instrumentalization, what at the same moment Herbert Marcuse may have called introjection, the making of the subject into a servo, into an assemblage of material and ideological processes through which the subject is alienated from personal agency. Schneemann would build her own control mechanisms, a room even, in which a multiplicity of media—photographic slide projections, motion picture projections, televisions, computers, and pop radio—are atomized under fine and deliberate modulation, in a kind of inversion of the Cold War command center. These means of “sophisticated, scientific management and organization” may not only be induced to fragmentation, but one’s psychophysiological character as defined by those technologies.7 This technical-libidinal ambivalence has some of its basis in Schneemann’s work with the Judson Dance Theater early in her
7 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 10.
102 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 career. Examination of a recent staging of Lateral Splay, a key work from the artist’s time with Judson, assists our understanding of the process by which this ambivalence developed.
2. “Particles bombarding space”: Lateral Splay (1963)
In 2012, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York, Schneemann stepped along the perimeter of the performance floor. She executed small gestures with her hands like gentle waves, as if to test the air for minute currents. She lifted a field whistle and blew once. Fourteen performers emerged from corners of the church floor. They dispersed and cut diagonals across the full space. One looked upon another, watched. They stalked each other, then sprung. The pair grappled in their running collision. Both dropped to the floor, and went slack. Moments later each would arise and separate as if recharged to find another partner with which to collide. The floor was littered with performers’ bodies at rest. Others looked for a new confrontation. Schneemann blew on her field whistle again.
The performers made crawling runs across the floor. As they hunched low, their arm swung in caricatured ape-walks. They stared ahead without expression. They set themselves on straight paths across the floor. They were activated by “muscular instrumentalities, more animal than machine,” determined by a “physiological sense of movement and muscular direction.”8 We watched as the performers inevitably collided with one another, again and again. But as before, when collision occurred each crumpled to the floor as if evacuated of their propulsion. The second episode was distinguished by
8 Schneemann, communication with the author, July 7, 2014.
103 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 rhythmic swish-thump sounds made by the performers’ hands and feet. No stalking.
Rather, deliberate steps one to the next until halted by an exterior object. Several thumped into pillars. In one instance, a performer ambled into a spectator seated in the first row and crumpled at contact. The performers voided their agency. Their energy served simple directives.
Another burst from Schneemann’s field whistle marked the third and final sequence. Arms outstretched, backs straight, and faces set forward, the performers threw themselves into circular motions. They cast their bodies between competing forces. They wrung themselves into the execution of actions determined to test the limits of stability.
Momentum propelled their trunks and arms against the runs demanded of their legs. The participants’ feet slipped and slapped the floor, catching their bodies for a moment before they launched into another turn, drawing frenetic helixes. And again each crumpled to the floor at collision, their hands swinging into each other, into solid pillars, at highest possible speed. The participants seemed to find grace in their momentary lift from the floor, but then always crashed, always returned, in “alignment” to the force of gravity.
Schneemann reflects, “we loved the collapse.”9
In the three sequences of Lateral Splay, the group enacted a kind of playful switching between autonomy and collectivity, between their particular character and their status as instrument of Schneemann’s instructions. Through their movements, they sought to concretize a propulsive process between control and its release, between self- consciousness and a willful giving over of their bodies. The participants’ actions
9 Schneemann, communication with the author, July 7, 2014.
104 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 suggested a network of energy in a process of continuous generation and dispersal. How a body comes to move from one position to another is the primary aim of the work: for the artist, a body—her body, those of her collaborators, those of her audience—are aggressively determined by multiple forces. Lateral Splay was an analytic process by which to “manifest in space” new gestures against the structures of power that move a body from one place to another against its will. In 1962-63, at the time of her conception of Lateral Splay, Schneemann wrote, “The fundamental life of any material I use is concretized in that material’s gesture—gesticulation, gestation, source of compression
(measure of tension and expansion), resistance, developing force of visual action.”
“Manifest in space,” she asserted, “any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.
Performers or glass, fabric, wood—all are potent as variable gesture units: color, light, and sound will contrast or enforce the quality of a particular gesture’s area of action and its emotional texture.”10
Lateral Splay was first presented on November 19 and 20, 1963, in Judson Dance
Concert #13. Schneemann’s 2012 staging of Lateral Splay at St. Mark’s Church comprised her contribution to Judson Now, a series of events produced by Danspace
Project to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Judson Dance Theater, active between
1962 and 1966 at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village, New York. Judson Church was an intensive environment of creativity. It is difficult to overestimate the Judson
Dance Theater’s impact on late twentieth century art. The present ubiquity of intermedial experimentation, and the incorporation of everyday gestures and common materials, may
10 Carolee Schneemann, “From the Notebooks” (1962-63), Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 48.
105 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 trace its origins to the path-breaking work of its participants. Schneemann presented several projects at Judson, including Newspaper Event (1963), Chromelodeon (1963), and
Meat Joy, re-staged in 1964 after productions in Paris and London. In the group,
Schneemann was a painter among dancers. She sought to break the planar surface of the canvas, understanding painting as a premise as much as a medium. In 1979 Schneemann reflected that Lateral Splay functioned as “an explosive and linear refrain, a propulsive jet of movement cutting through the sequences of other works and the materials of the environment.” She continued, “It involves a maximum expenditure of directed energy; in rehearsals we practiced with the sense that the runners were particles bombarding space.”11 Schneemann sought to ground optical privilege within a complex body. And she explored its aggregate “units of time” through a range of media.
3. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room (1970)
The Electronic Activation Room extrapolated the “propulsive jets of movement,” her formulation of performers as “particles bombarding space,” into an environment. And her work came to accrue more menace. The Electronic Activation Room, made in collaboration with the London-based artist John Lifton, was a site of concentrated, cacophonous media technologies triggered by the audience’s presence. The artists sought to respond to the increasingly mediated culture of 1960s, and in particular American military intervention in Vietnam, by amplifying what mediation commodified, removed, and effaced. Indeed, the Electronic Activation Room understands media technologies as
11 Carolee Schneemann, “Lateral Splay,” More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1979), 47.
106 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 not the mode by which the conflict was represented, rather its defining condition. Media technologies did not clarify, did not make sense, rather were a process of obfuscation, division, and violence. Here, for Schneemann and Lifton, was an unbearable tautology presumed as the terms of everyday life: culture became a sequence of involuntary responses induced under a “method of limits,” as it is called in psychophysics, determined by the same techniques of aggression. Triggering the motion sensors again and again, a viewer was relegated to a conduit of culpability, a subject of stimulus- response dynamics in a predetermined range of interactivity. Here was hyperbolization of the claim that nuclear self-annihilation was not a potential hazard, rather the inevitable result of a culture determined by militaristic logic. In this context, joy—a central propulsion for Schneemann’s earlier projects—turned into acrid ambivalence, racing into fury.
The Electronic Activation Room was developed in London and constructed in
Köln for the group show Happening & Fluxus at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. The
Electronic Activation Room barraged viewers with projections of Vietnam atrocity photographs, clips from radio and pop songs. German television spewed from stacks of monitors. Slide and film projections of Schneemann’s previous kinetic theater projects overlapped. The images lost their representational coherence in their numerous appearance. They were further atomized by 78 small, square mirrors, each approximately the size of a 35mm slide, arranged in a grid and activated by by servo motors, the “mirror box.” Together, the images became a semi-abstract swirl of light and motion with fleeting evocations of the matters they depicted. This materiality was underscored by
107 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Schneemann and Lifton’s treatment of the walls of their area which they covered with white paper in irregular manner. The paper drooped and curled away from the wall resulting in a fragmentary sense of depth and weight to the images, which broke across the white paper “screens.” In addition, a screen of discarded nylon Organza floated in the space. Mirror pieces affixed to the synthetic fabric pulled at the material, further breaking the integrity of the projection lights. The images peeled away as if they disintegrated on contact, not unlike the flesh of the napalm victims who flickered from the projectors.
In the Kunstverein, Schneemann and Lifton were allotted a space of sixteen-by- sixteen feet cordoned by three walls. They enclosed their space further with a temporary fourth wall. They ringed the space with media apparatuses. The machines, while set at the walls, pressed inward, turning the space’s square dimensions circular. The central area was the throw space for the projectors, their beams criss-crossing each other at the viewer’s only available position of experience. A viewer was forced to step into the target-point of multiple audio-visual transmissions. The Electronic Activation Room was not a display of devices as aesthetic objects of sculptural connotation (such as, for example, Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV of 1965), nor were they simply supports for the presentation of pre-recorded sounds and images. Rather they dissected the fragile threshold of sense presumed in these devices. The result was a multi-sensory attack which sought to evoke in both form and content the violent events endured by others that seem as remote and ascetic as the technologies used in their communication. No TV set in a corner, stereo in another: rather an overabundance of devices, which, by means of their massed presence, imposed an affective force contradictory to their commercial
108 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 intention. Like Lateral Splay, the Electronic Activation Room alerted a viewer to the body as an instrument that is too easily determined by external powers. In the performance, participants rehearsed a series of directions that made visible in exaggeration the contrived codes of corporeal movement, of walking, running, of body language, and the material weight, the forces at work, in one’s body. In the Electronic Activation Room, a viewer was seized in a feedback loop lurching into sensory overload.
This affective pressure was complicated by an accommodation to the viewer: on the floor of the space the artists provided seat-cushions in the form of piled hair roller foam. Found discarded, the six-by-four-foot scrap pieces were remainders from the mechanically-cut product. The bright-pink-colored material was layered in squashed honey-combs, a synthetic nest. Set among clear plastic inflatables, the floor covering gave way to a viewer’s footsteps, diminishing one’s proprioceptive confidence. Hyper- aware of the uneven, pliant surface, viewers contended with multiple demands on their attention. Shards of bright projector light scattered around them, upon the flaking wall- screens, the nylon-mirror assemblage, upon their own bodies. “More luscious than severe,” Schneemann reflected, in the sense of a smooth trap of passive-aggression, shutting one inside the machine.12 It was a kind of living room blown apart: rather than couches or overstuffed recliners, viewers found themselves among the synthetic innards, the stuffing itself, from these objects. The guts of postwar middle class life were strewn across the space.
12 Schneemann, communication with the author, July 7, 2014.
109 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 The foam and inflatables required unnatural gestures from the viewers, forcing them to pick their way through the material, lifting legs, compensating unsure balance with arms outstretched and jerking stiffly, they peered among the changing light for their next foothold. Foam stuck to their skin, clung on their clothes. It lifted from the floor.
Dark mounds rose into the gambit of projected light. Viewers cast shadows unrecognizable as their own, further pitched and broken by the mirrored nylon. They could only continue to trigger the motion sensors as they tried to make sense of the surroundings in the audio-visual wash. Schneemann and Lifton wished to “merge” the audience and the images.13 In this way, the Electronic Activation Room expands upon
Lateral Splay: “When collision occurred [between participants running at highest possible speed and an obstacle in their space] the runner had to meet the obstacle at full speed, merge with it, and fall down.”14 Perhaps through the impositions of the Electronic
Activation Room, Schneemann and Lifton posited, the spectator would recognize herself as a performer for machines, as a machine. The given networks of control and communication would splinter apart. Passivity would be untenable, unbearable. In this way, vision was not allegorized to technological processes, rather indicted as a technological process as well. To enter the Electronic Activation Room was to become the literal “meat” trapped in a closed network of paroxysmal apparatuses triggered by one’s presence.
13 Carolee Schneemann, in public remarks at the symposium Carolee Schneemann: Then and Now, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, October 19, 2012.
14 Schneemann, “Lateral Splay,” More Than Meat Joy, 47.
110 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 4. Happening & Fluxus (1970-1971)
Happening & Fluxus was curated by Harald Szeemann in cooperation with Hanns Sohm, the German former dentist and avid collector of ephemera related to happening, fluxus, intermedia, Aktionism, and performance art. The book published in association with the exhibition (that is, not an exhibition catalog in a conventional sense) is a massive compendium of material from Hanns Sohm’s collection. Schneemann contributed five pages of collaged photo-documentation of Water Light/Water Needle (1966) and Fuses
(1964-67) among resumé text. The fifth page features her collaboration with John Lifton and “Meat Systems Incorporated.” Additional advertisements for Schneemann’s work may be found in the book chronologically organized among other materials in Sohm’s possession. Hannah Higgins notes that the book was the “first document containing primary materials and a Happenings and Fluxus timeline.”15
Schneemann proposed her contribution to the show in a letter to Harald Szeemann dated July 31, 1970. Her words assist our understanding of the development of her aspirations from that summer 1970 into that autumn, when the Happening & Fluxus exhibition opened at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on November 6th. Schneemann wrote:
“I’m planning a simplified auto-documentation environment—…My proposal is to assemble an inflatable room - 12 to 14 ft. diameter: overlapping circular ‘walls’ of mirrored plastic; mud and st[r]aw or foam polyurethane floor; film projector (loops); 3
15 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 233, n. 71.
111 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 slide carousels, two tape recorders, photo blow-ups.”16 Her assertion of “auto- documentation” suggests the autobiographical character that defined other works of the time, such as the films in the Autobiographical Trilogy, which would include Fuses, the in-progress Plumb Line (1968-71), and later, Kitch’s Last Meal, previously mentioned.
“Environment” suggests the extrapolation of happenings and fluxus events into built space, often in coordination with electronic media, pervasive in the era. If we recall the assaultive intent of the Electronic Activation Room in its final realization, we find a poignant atomization of her resumé. Viet-Flakes (1965) and Fuses, projected simultaneously, against each other, generated a fierce confrontation between state- sponsored killing and sexual pleasure. Further complicating the visual field was photo- documentation of Snows, Meat Joy, and Water Light/Water Needle emitted from three stacked, oscillating 35-mm slide carousels. These projections were directed the mirror box. The broken, overlapping images were reflected into the space, upon its ragged screens.
Schneemann’s “auto-documentation environment” hyperbolizes a process of self- erasure on two registers: one, in the immediate context of her ancillary position in the history of happenings and fluxus; and two, more broadly the abdication of personal responsibility enabled by means of the media technologies, here a re-purposed computer system controlling the motion sensors, the movement of the projectors, the refraction of the mirror box. All the more ironic for corporality was an explicit feature of Happening &
Fluxus. Wolf Vostell penned a live, pregnant cow in the Kunstverein, though it was
16 Carolee Schneemann, letter to Harald Szeemann, July 31, 1970. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archiv Hanns Sohm, Happening & Fluxus Köln 1970, Korrespondenz.
112 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 removed by authorities before the exhibition opened. Hermann Nitsch conducted an
Aktionist event with animal viscera and priest’s raiments. In contrast, the Electronic
Activation Room appears as a perceptive, predictive site of automatic control at the juncture of art and life. In Happening & Fluxus, a raucous congealing of international avant-garde projects, the Electronic Activation Room is a melancholic transmission from the future, mourning the pass of a culture in which Schneemann was never well fit, but already seeing through and critiquing the rising euphoric affection for multimedia. For
Schneemann, the promise of expanded cinema was troubled by participants’ stubborn disavowal of its undergirding contingency, gendered bias, and prejudices against desire, suffused by hyper-militaristic imperialism generalized to the status of mass culture.
Rumbling in a darkened stall at the rear of the Kunstverein, far away from Vostell’s cow pen, was another kind of cordon. The Meat System pressed upon the technical-libidinal process between cause and effect itself, sought out the servos at work, materially and ideologically, to find “SPACE ( a place ) between desire and experience.”17 Cold War technophilia was the condition of flesh. “Automatic control” was the premise by which life would be administered.
5. Operation: Igloo White
Schneemann’s projection systems in the Electronic Activation Room were directed by
“human intrusion detectors” not unrelated to those in use simultaneously in Southeast
Asia by the United States Air Force in Operation Igloo White. By 1967, the bombing
17 Carolee Schneemann, “From the Notebooks, 1963-1966” (1966), More Than Meat Joy, 59.
113 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 campaigns conducted by American forces against North Vietnam—Operation Rolling
Thunder—were ineffectual. The movement of enemy combatants and supplies into South
Vietnam seemed to continue unabated despite the unprecedented volume of ordnance applied. The Defense Communications Planning Group (DCPG) was formed under the personal direction of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with the mission to develop a more efficient means to halt the enemy interdiction. The DCPG devised Operation Igloo
White, a complex mobilization of sensors deposited along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.
The sensors were triggered sonically, by heat, motion, electromagnetic forces, or by changes in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere such as increased concentrations of ammonia: the scent of urine. The sensors transmitted data to computers at the Infiltration
Surveillance Center (ISC) Air Force base at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. The computers— state-of-the-art IBM 360-65’s—were huge infrastructures, making the ISC the largest
American military complex in Southeast Asia. “The sensors passed on their electronic impulses or the sounds they detected to relay aircraft hovering nearby or directly to intelligence or command centers in the air or on the ground.”18 The IBM computers would then direct airstrikes by fighter-bombers to the sensor. “The enemies had met, an engagement of sorts had taken place, but one side had been invisible. It had followed the script of a classical ambush, except the ambushing force consisted entirely of machines instead of men.”19
18 Edgar C. Dolman Jr., et al, The Vietnam Experience: Tools of War (Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1985), 154.
19 Dolman Jr., Tools of War, 146.
114 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “A TV-type screen provides the Assessment Officer a map of the section of Laos under his control. Each of the roads used by the North Vietnamese in his area is etched on his screen. As the seismic and acoustic sensors pick up the truck movements their locations appear as an illuminated line of light, called ‘the worm,’ that crawls across his screen, following a road that sometimes is several hundreds of miles away. From there the battle becomes academic. The Assessment Officer and the computer confer on probable times the convoy or convoys will reach a pre- selected point on the map. This point is a ‘box’ selected by the Igloo White team of experts at the ISC. Airborne at the moment are gunships and fighters. A decision is made as to the type of ordnance best suited for the area.”20
Executed by Observational Squadron 67, the “Ghost Squadron,” among other units, Operation Igloo White was an “electronic wall,” a “complete sensor surveillance system.”21 The Americans were now the invisible, ghost-like force—not the Viet Cong— and made of machines, not men, surprising their opponents by the cloak of technological innovation. Such was the fantasy of Operation Igloo White.
Operation Igloo White was a project enormous in scope and cost while dubious in its results. At a cost of one billion dollars a year in its fives years of existence, its cessation was precipitated by the siege at Khe Sanh Marine Corps base and the subsequent Tet Offensive throughout South Vietnam in early 1968. Following the withdrawal of American forces from Khe Sanh, the “McNamara Line” ceased operation and the North Vietnamese resumed their activity throughout the DMZ area. In March of that year, President Johnson ordered the halt of indiscriminate bombing and
20 George L. Weiss, “Battle for Control of the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” Armed Forces Journal (February 15, 1971): 22, quoted in Gibson, The Perfect War, 397.
21 Anthony J. Tambini, Wiring Vietnam: The Electronic Wall (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2007), 8.
115 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 commencement of peace talks, but ultimately the application of massive ordnance onto
North Vietnam positions—the “communicative theory of bombing”22—was reinstated by
President Nixon in 1969. While the sensor would become a ubiquitous component of military and civilian life, “the heart of Igloo White” lost favor to indiscriminate engulfment, the massive destructive force of conventional ordnance, in the urgency of the
Tet Offensive.23 “Surveillance, collecting and reporting, was like a carnival bear show now, broken and dumb, an Intelligence beast, our own,” Michael Herr writes. “And by late 1967, while it went humping and stalking all over Vietnam the Tet Offensive was already so much incoming.”24
James William Gibson has written a comprehensive account of Operation Igloo
White as a manifestation of “Technowar.” “At the point when Technowar reaches its technological apex, it turns completely into a representation. Indeed, the very name for a
‘target’ was ‘target signature.’ And when the ‘target’ was destroyed, the lights on the screen went out. The representation disappeared.”25 A cascade of abstractions was formulated, in which the target was a programmed threshold point, and the sensor was destroyed in the process of retaliation. “Technowar bombed many real trucks located by its sensors and special army reconnaissance patrols, but it also fooled itself.”26 Gibson’s work has been extended by Paul Edwards, who positions Operation Igloo White as an
22 Gibson, The Perfect War, 369.
23 Dolman Jr., Tools of War, 144.
24 Herr, Dispatches, 51-52.
25 Gibson, The Perfect War, 397.
26 Gibson, The Perfect War, 399.
116 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 apogee of Cold War-era closed world discourse. “Operation Igloo White’s centralized, computerized, automated method of ‘interdiction’ resembled a microcosmic version of the whole United States approach to the Vietnam War,” Edwards writes. “In Operation
Igloo White we see how these techno-strategic development were played out on a regional scale: centralized, remote-controlled operations based on advanced computing and communications gear; an abstract representation of events (sensors, maps, grids,
‘worms’) justified in terms of statistics; and a wide gap between an official discourse of overwhelming success and the pessimistic assessments of independent observers, including American soldiers on the ground.”27
Schneemann’s use of these sensors in the Electronic Activation Room presents a kind of praxis of interdiction, an enactment of this technologically-aided, inward-directed operation in microcosmic form. In the “closed world” of Operation Igloo White, vast resources were devoted to the devastating perpetuation of its claims to veracity, a
“production model of war” masquerading as an ontology of automatic control.28 In the
Electronic Activation Room, we find a trenchant critique of this abstraction—its arrangement of “sensors, maps, grids, ‘worms’”—as but a mass of data that resolves only in its own necessity, an answer that precludes all questions. “We began to evolve a 180 degree panorama in which overlays of images on the slides would dissolve depth perspective, superimposing alternating fields,” Schneemann wrote of the production process.29 The audience is a mass of intruders in need of accounting, their bodies no less
27 Edwards, The Closed World, 4-6.
28 Gibson, The Perfect War, 26.
29 Schneemann, “Electronic Activation Room,” 203.
117 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 a social formulation than the images breaking apart around them, “depth perspective” itself a historical conceit directed to the order of annihilation. Through Schneemann’s work, Thomas Schelling’s “idiom of military action” belies its fragile operative condition, its contingency to an “onanic analogy.”
6. “Onanic analogy”: Wolf Vostell’s Electronic dé-coll/age, Happening Room (1968)
Wolf Vostell’s Electronic dé-coll/age, Happening Room (also called Electronic
Happening Room or Hommage to Dürer) assists our examination of Schneemann’s
Electronic Activation Room. Vostell’s Room was produced two years prior, in 1968, for the Institute of Modern Art in Nuremberg, and for the Venice Biennale. The work is comprised of six television monitors set onto a floor covered in broken glass. Each monitor is modified with other objects activated by simple motors. TV Set #1 includes a sickle slicing across its disrupted screen image. It includes a “Vietnam ‘rake/boots’ unit”: on top of the shards of glass lay a pair each of combat boots, women’s shoes, and child’s shoes, all treated to the same dark brown-black color, like slick ash. A short rake, attached to a painters’ roller, pushes at the pile. The shoes’ leather laces entangle on the tines of the rake. TV Set #3 emits a vertically and horizontally squeezed picture. Atop the unit, a servo worked the gears of bicycle, which are attached to skis sliding over the top edge of the monitor screen. Industrial wire fixed to the tips of the skis proceed to small shovels at the other end of their length, pulling and pushing them into glass pieces. TV Set #5 includes a kettle bomb studded with candy: some kind of mocking, perilous totem. Its own servomechanism works a hoe and painter’s roller assemblage with a taxidermied
118 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 bird, its wings outstretched.30 A so-called “honey pot” (an electronic trap utilizing motion sensors) in TV Set #3 incorporates signals of a viewer’s presence in the space by the simple computer modulating the actions of the assemblages. Vostell was assisted by technician Peter Saage. Saage explained the interactive elements: “In communicating with the electronic dé-coll/age happening room, you change it. Your position in the room is reported to a computer in the form of electrical pulses derived from the photocells.
During your absence, your behavior is temporarily adopted by self-excited pulse sources in onanic analogy.”31
Vostell’s Electronic dé-coll/age, Happening Room and Schneemann’s Electronic
Activation Room offer two complementary modes of operation in the history of electronic spaces. In Vostell’s “onanic analogy,” spectatorship is reduced to mere electrical pulses, the on-off of a remote control that activates a compulsive repetition, a horrific mimicry of ineffectual persistence. These are electronic totems of simpering inefficiency. In this way, the sculptural nature of Vostell’s work suggests a historical trajectory closer to Jean
Tinguely’s suicide machines, such as Homage to New York (1960), than to Schneemann’s
Electronic Activation Room. The latter work does not hyperbolize the destructive capabilities of the machines as a metaphor for a nihilist relation between machine and human, rather uses the machines to uncover the destructive character by which individuals and machines are determined. If this destructive character is to be thwarted,
30 Wolf Vostell, “Hommage to Dürer,” Miss Vietnam and Texts of Other Happenings, trans. Carl Weissner (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1968), 35-39.
31 Peter Saage, quoted at Media Art Net < http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/elektronische- decollage/images/3/?desc=full>, accessed June 20, 2014.
119 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 then sophisticated examination of their internal dynamics, at the juncture of technical- libidinal processes, is required. In the Electronic Activation Room, Schneemann also forced an acute confrontation with the technology by which desire and violence are determined. However, whereas Vostell’s viewers activate the system-as-carcass,
Schneemann’s viewers are the meat of the system electronically stitched into the images.
Which is worse, Schneemann’s crowded stall in the Kölnischer Kunstverein seems to ask: that the visceral imagery is too close and too many for one to attain coherence, or that the fragments one can discern in their specific ordeals and pleasures, are so far away, so distant, in their mediation as to only evoke one’s inconsequence against conveyance technologies? An aggressive ambivalence was at work in the Electronic Activation Room at the moment discourses of multimedia experimentation became pervasive.
7. Parts of a Body House (1966-1972)
Consider Parts of a Body House. While existing only in drawings, watercolor sketches, and texts, Schneemann’s description assists our understanding of the realized work, and gives a fuller sense of the artist’s increasingly sophisticated engagement with methods of technical-libidinal control. With mordant humor not previously found in her writing,
Schneemann describes a section of the space, “The Genitals Play - Erotica Meat Room”:
“In the center of the Body House … A large, curving space filled entirely with wonderfully fashioned, over-life-size pricks, balls, nipples, clitorises, labia majora, labia minors, cunts and ass holes. They will be lifelike in variations of detail, color, aroma and moisture; contracted from flesh like materials, they completely cover floors, walls,
120 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ceiling.” Here we find a space for a multi-sensory confrontation with the biological apparatuses of libidinal acuity, a playful “ball pit” of a different sort. Yet in the description we find a parody of the alleged overabundance of sexual promiscuity in the era, for these genital forms “are electrically charged and when handled properly they will undergo lifelike transformations and as they are touched they communicate to the toucher, flood the toucher with the most extreme sensations he or she could normally feel.” These over-life-size genitals would pass an electrical charge to a fondler, to the degree of “the most extreme sensations.”
The proposal suggests an orgone energy accumulator, the device invented by
Wilhelm Reich in 1940. Schneemann cites Reich as a crucial influence on her work.
“Reich gave me permission” for exploration of female sexuality, she wrote.32 Reich conceived of the device as a means to concentrate recuperative bio-electrical force, what he called orgone energy.33 A space of individual sequestration, the accumulator is reminiscent of telephone booth, a confessional, or a torture chamber. An accumulator is comprised of conventional building supplies: common insulation, wood, and sheet metal.
It contains not moving parts. Yet, the accumulator served as the impetus for an violent raid on Reich’s laboratory in Rangeley, Maine. Under the auspices of accusations of false remedies, the Food and Drug Administration destroyed Reich’s research and instruments in any way related to the accumulator. As nearly all of Reich’s work at the time was related to the accumulator, his books were subject to two rounds of confiscation and
32 Carolee Schneemann in email communication with the author, 29 August 2008, and passim.
33 See Wilhelm Reich, The Discovery of the Orgone, Volume 2: The Cancer Biopathy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973).
121 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 incineration by the FDA. Reich died of heart failure in a Pennsylvania state penitentiary.
In Schneemann’s proposal for Parts of a Body House, Reich’s intentions are in part refracted by their infamy. By the early 1970s, Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution was in its seventh printing. His theories were circulating widely, not least for the notorious tragedy of his demise. Yet the optimism of his project seemed far away.34 In Parts of a
Body House we find the promise of sexual liberation leavened with the experience of the technocratic impulse as it was applied to purposes unprecedented in their fatality. While
Parts of a Body House certainly aims to induce pleasurable excitations in a site of polymorphous sexuality, the ecstasy is tempered by a sense of cultural energies directed into domestic and foreign policies defined by an seemingly unending litany of grueling shocks.
Schneemann’s proposal continues with poetic ambivalence. She strives for a tone short of cynicism. Her words culminate the technical-libidinal situation Parts of a Body
House into a provisional theory of the image. “The genitals-meat are disposed so that it is possible to climb on them, swing on them, ride, run and jumper among them—all the time receiving an ecstatic electrical current. Being a putting on a taking off and opening and following a strange courtship a romance (not all forms of violence are destructive) foam forms for energy streams followed into movement moment take in color texture as
34 Wilhelm Reich’s work and its circulation in the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s is discussed at greater length in Chapter Four.
122 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 physical necessity/immediacy: An Image.”35 Libidinal energy is propulsion for, and matter of, the image. Here we see Schneemann’s complex understanding of mediation.
While media technologies are a process of distanciation, and concretization, they are also comprised of catalytic charge. Informative context may be drawn from the circumstances in which the Electronic Activation Room was presented. Schneemann and Lifton built their site-specific, multimedia environment of extraordinary complexity under the auspices of a retrospective show for happenings and fluxus artists. The fact that
Schneemann remained on deeply ambivalent terms with those cohorts is a crucial detail of this scene.
8. “Mechanical labyrinths ring us”: Kinetic Theater works (1965-1967)
Kinetic theater was Schneemann’s term for her heterogeneous mode of production in
Meat Joy and other works of that period. Kinetic theater was a process of intervention against suppressive cultural conceits, in particular the relegation of women to domestic bliss. The term referred to a constellation of tactics determined by the artist’s access to materials. Schneemann sought materials dismissed as scraps from industrial construction and furriers, discarded meat, especially the refuse of the day-to-day demands of the domestic. The works became increasingly complex. Ghost Rev (1965) and Snows incorporated film projections, strobe systems, and motion sensors, with elements of live
35 Carolee Schneemann, “Parts of a Body House,” in Fantastic Architecture, eds. Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins (West Glover: Something Else Press, 1970), unpaginated. The book was originally published in 1969 as Pop Architektur by Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf. In 1972 Schneemann published “Parts of a Body House” in book form. See Carolee Schneemann, Parts of a Body House (Devon: Beau Geste Press, 1972).
123 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 performance, alongside the common matter Schneemann collected from New York streets. The works are now considered classics of so-called expanded cinema. “I wanted the mechanical gestures of machine parts to equal performers’ movements—exposed as part of the total environment to which they contribute particular effects,” Schneemann wrote of the development of Snows.36 This premise of equivalence between machines and performers begins to specify the materialism of Schneemann’s libidinal engineering.
We will ascertain how Schneemann incorporated discourses and apparatuses of media technologies into her work by exploration of her activity between 1966 and 1968, the period between the dissolution of the Judson Dance Theater and Schneemann’s departure for London, where she would develop the Meat Systems. In February 1967,
Schneemann’s project Snows received support from Experiments in Art and Technology.
In August of that year, she also participated in 9 Evenings series of 1966: 12 Evenings of
Manipulation in the newly-reopened Judson Gallery. As art historian Judith Rodenbeck describes, 12 Evenings was a significant retort to EAT’s 9 Evenings of the previous year.
Where 1966 marked the end “critical implosion in 1966 of many of the intermedia strategies urged in those manifestoes in projects” such as 9 Evenings and Andy Warhol’s
Exploding Plastic Inevitable events (1965-66), “each of which took up and (whether knowingly or not) largely undermined the formal, intermedial, and performative premises of the earlier texts” formulating Happenings, such as the collectively authored “Project in
Multiple Dimensions” (1957) and Allan Kaprow’s “The Legacy of Jackson
36 Carolee Schneemann, “Snows,” More Than Meat Joy, 148-149.
124 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Pollock” (1958).37 Schneemann is ill-fit within these historical and discursive parameters, as her work selectively incorporates aspects of each area, neither hewing too closely to theoretical programs nor to expectations attributed to a particular medium. The interdisciplinary mode of Schneemann’s work, especially its contention with sexuality and gender, has posed considerable challenge to art historians. The implications of its multimedia constitution and its libidinal character have received incomplete accounts through analytic parameters that assail the work for its incommensurability with generic expectations or that ignore the work all together—a kind of discursive double-bind in which the work is either incoherent on given terms of art-historical analysis, or, when considered, subject to definition that is contingent upon excising of its sexual character in favor of symbolic relation, and claims to politics strikingly shorn of bodily affect. In this way, the technical-libidinal character of the work, the constitutive interrelation of desire and its formulations through a range of assemblages under rubrics such as kinetic theater, has been left under-considered. The body is either posed as the defining condition concomitant with preclusion of social and historical context, or the body is theorized as a site of elision, encumbered by regrettable excess of sexuality.
Schneemann’s unraveling of quintessential accoutrements of postwar middle class life in the Electronic Activation Room may seem a continuation of the “parodic inversion” of advertising culture Pamela Lee finds in Ghost Rev, a kind of mimesis of
37 Judith Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 6.
125 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 incoherence.38 Lee writes that a moment of self-induced blindness in a projector beam by
Schneemann and other participants at a crucial sequence in the work constitutes “a peculiar type of obliteration, of being obliterated into the materiality of an image that had assumed an environmental or architectural force.”39 Drawing the notion of “obliteration” from the work of Yayoi Kusama, Lee asserts that Schneemann’s blindness is indicative of her pursuit of a “strange form of liberation.” Lee writes, “What remains in the wake of vision is the body, if a body haptically grasping.” When Lee finds “bodily confusion, a loss of control of the body by the image at large,” in Schneemann’s work, she evokes an hysteric’s pageant in Ghost Rev.40
The optical register was premised on the capabilities of the body. “I saw the way film could be activated by literal, formal properties into a material equation with the constructions,” Schneemann writes on Ghost Rev, elaborating those activations as:
“increasing the ambiguity of the focal plane of film into actual space; extending, compounding repetitions and variations of color, rhythm, texture and literal imagery from film into environment and performance.” Indeed, “the performance presumed the films antagonistic, that the two performers [Schneemann and Phoebe Neville] would spread action in literal dimensions away from the fixed-screen illusions of image, depth, speed, rhythm, directions, duration.” The body led as a means of propulsion. With
Schneemann’s incorporation of projection media, the body was not diminished in favor of
38 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 207.
39 Lee, Chronophobia, 207.
40 Lee, Chronophobia, 207.
126 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the optical sense as directed by the projections: on the contrary, it was asserted in
“antagonistic” relation to any presumed primacy of vision associated with the contingent representational character of the projections.
When blindness arrives in Ghost Rev, “the audience is gone. They’re looking right through you and they don’t know that they’re gone!”41 Here Schneemann describes a mutual complication of visual rapport in which the established parameters of vision and command are untethered. We find a poignant detaching of the sense from privilege, concomitant with assertion of the body. In Schneemann’s blindness, it is the audience who loses their hold on materiality in her own visual sense (“they don’t even know that they’re gone”). Schneemann instigates a kind of fort-da game in which she plays both the controller and the object. Ghost Rev began with Schneemann and Neville draping strings of flashlights around themselves, then crawling down the aisles of the theater42—the matter of light collapsed into the energy of stimulus-response.
The momentary disturbance of the performers’ image finds a cogent comparison in Robert Whitman’s multimedia project Prune.Flat., also from 1965. In one sequence of
Prune.Flat., Whitman directed a female performer to stand as still as possible in front of an image of herself removing clothing projected upon her white-clothed form. In this way, the work aims to question alleged ontological and experiential fixity of the cinematic situation. We might productively understand Ghost Rev in relation to what
Andrew Uroskie describes as a “deliberate staging of cinematic exhibition and
41 Carolee Schneemann, “Ghost Rev,” More Than Meat Joy, 97-99.
42 Schneemann, “Ghost Rev,” More Than Meat Joy, 99.
127 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 spectatorship, the ‘acting out’ of metaphors for the cinematic situation” in Prune.Flat..43
Out of the classic dynamic of the striptease, the cited sequence of Prune.Flat. exemplifies the work’s oscillation between material and phantasmal registers. “The flickering, spectral bodies within Prune.Flat served not so much as images but as screen for the spectator’s phantasmal projection,” Uroskie writes.44 Furthermore, we may draw important understanding from where Ghost Rev and Prune.Flat. depart in their affinity.
While Prune.Flat. troubles the ontological relation between photographic image and performer, Ghost Rev seeks to press upon the gendered power relations at work behind such experimentation. Questions of ontology are interpenetrated by questions of power: notions of unassailable truth are inextricable from contingent determining networks of difference on the level of gender, pleasure, and pain. In Ghost Rev, as with Snows, there are particular bodies under direction of particular forces incorporated into the selective disturbances of the motion picture projections. In Snows, as the projection light carries specific images to its extraordinary screens, so too the performers sought to redefine their relations to their audience in the difference effaced in the conventional purposes of the moving image technologies. This was not refusal, rather disruption from within, an attempt to redefine the terms of control and its loss.
In December 1965, just a few weeks after presenting Ghost Rev, Schneemann articulated her the necessarily combinatory character of her work. “Notice this insistence on Motion. We cannot capture, hold a moment (impressionism), repeat the moment’s
43 Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 136.
44 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 143.
128 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 verbal content (theater), capture the action itself (futurism): we intensify the perceptions of change, flux, and release in juxtapositions which grind in on the senses.”45 She described her impressions of the modes of production by her happenings colleagues. On
Whitman she wrote, “Whitman’s performances the most interiorized, tactile, plastic- poetic, evolving less specific time-space than Oldenburg’s … Whitman leaves the audience as discrete, perceiving agents.” Schneemann followed with a list of key traits she associated with the artists: “Image—Whitman/ Atmosphere—Oldenburg/
Concordance—Kaprow (audience/participant must agree to his procedures) …”46
Schneemann articulates what she learns from her colleagues as she hones her own projects. Where Whitman “leaves the audience as discrete, perceiving agents,”
Schneemann sought to press in exactly upon their “phantasmal projections” so to redirect their psychosexual propulsions. Here we find Schneemann developing a collection of strategies for participant-spectator based not only on intersubjective relation but also body as instrument: “Our lives themselves as material … The distinctions here swinging between intellection/perception/action.”47
While Viet-Flakes was the “heart and core” of Snows, it was not that film which broke over the performers when their actions would seem most apparently transfixed by the projector’s light.48 As Erica Levin notes, the projector carried a film diary of the process of producing the work. Three of the six performers are overtaken by their own
45 Schneemann, “From the Notebooks, 1963-1966,” More Than Meat Joy, 56.
46 Schneemann, “From the Notebooks, 1963-1966,” More Than Meat Joy, 56.
47 Schneemann, “From the Notebooks, 1963-1966,” More Than Meat Joy, 56.
48 Schneemann, “Snows,” More Than Meat Joy, 129.
129 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 images. Across their forms flickered depictions of themselves from the preceding weeks laboring on the set and stage where they now stood. Where there may be a moment of awesome refusal, “the footage that overtakes the performers on stage pictures atrocity only in its absence, as a blind spot, something invisible, lurking in the play of everyday life.” In the work, correlation is made between the collision of images projected around them, five films in all, and the initially directed, yet increasingly improvised, collisions of the performers’ bodies on the stage. Levin continues, “By analogizing one mode of collision to the other, Schneemann links her exploration of the ontology of the photographic image to questions of empathy and political action.”49 Snows suggests a devotion not to induction of a transcendental state, rather to critical examination of the modes of production, ideological and technological, especially within the context of
American military intervention in Vietnam. Snows presents a rich dialectic between the content of the projection and its conveyance apparatus; Snows is a work of directed spontaneity, set resolutely within the processes by which authorial fixity is determined.
The performer and viewer each share the position of target: performer as contingent screen and viewer as source of electronic cues for the devices, to which the performers respond in turn. In this way, the uses to which the relay switching in Ghost Rev and
Snows are applied suggest a more complex network of command and control, in which a viewer and performer participate in a concentrated enacting of generalized conditioning of social behavior. In addition to the sound collage made by James Tenney for Viet-
Flakes, there was a second tape played during Snows: “a collage of trains shunting,
49 Erica Levin, “Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows,” in Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable (London: Black Dog, 2015).
130 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 whistling, moving in and out of an Illinois depot, overlaid and juxtaposed with sounds of orgasm.”50 Previous techniques of overt confrontation through strobe effects, multiple projections, live performance, and sound collages, were modified in the Electronic
Activation Room to emphasize enclosure of the viewer alone within the media devices.
The work grew more trenchant.
9. “An open-ended situation”: Pepsi Pavilion (1970)
Klüver writes in May 1971, reflecting on the monumental project produced contemporaneous to Schneemann’s Electronic Activation Room: “The initial concern of the artists who designed the Pavilion was that the quality of the experience of the visitor should involve choice, responsibility, freedom, and participation.” Klüver insists, “The
Pavilion would not tell a story or guide the visitor through a didactic, authoritarian experience. The visitor would be encouraged as an individual to explore the environment and compose his own experience.” He concludes: “As a work of art, the Pavilion and its operation would be an open-ended situation, an experiment in the scientific sense of the word.”51
Fred Turner has taken this up in the particular case of the organization
Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) and their Pavilion for Expo 70 in Osaka,
Japan. A site of complex, responsive electronic systems controlling picture and sound media, the Pavilion centered around a mirror room in which a viewer may confront a
50 Schneemann, “Snows,” More Than Meat Joy, 131.
51 Billy Klüver, “The Pavilion” (May 1971), in Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology, ed. Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), ix.
131 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 vivid inversion of their own image as if it were suspended before them. Outside the
Pavilion were “floats” by the artist Robert Breer. White bulbous forms the height of a person, the floats shuffled about the patio. When an obstacle was encountered, the floats emitted electronic noises and reversed direction. Sponsored by the Pepsi-Cola
Corporation, the Pavilion, was the signature undertaking of the EAT organization headed by engineer Billy Klüver. Turner writes that in the space of the Pavilion, “Visitors would not suffer under hierarchy; they would not be pushed around by any white-collar boss or his artistic equivalent. Rather, they would make their own way through a forest of technological wonders, guiding themselves by means of interaction with information systems. Such a vision was quintessentially cybernetic. It was also countercultural. And it was deeply consonant with the individualism at the heart of Cold War liberal politics and postwar consumerism.”52 I will consider the implications of this dualism through the particular case of Schneemann’s Electronic Activation Room, made near-simultaneously to EAT’s Pepsi Pavilion. As we shall see by means of a comparative analysis, these technically similar responsive systems were employed for radically divergent purposes within their ostensibly shared rhetoric of multi-media production. Exactly where EAT acclaimed its benevolent open systems, Schneemann found another “closed world,” a political desert of motivated, technocratic self-regard, reiterating it own privilege to conceive a space apparently devoid of politics: an infinite regression that finds its epitome in the Pavilion mirror room, inverting a viewer, pulling one into groundless illusion. Artists and engineers alike convinced themselves of their own efficacy.
52 Fred Turner, “The Corporation and the Counterculture: Revisiting the Pepsi Pavilion and the Politics of Cold War Multimedia,” The Velvet Light Trap 73 (Spring 2014), 74.
132 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Schneemann’s association with EAT in the mid-1960s underscores the conflict within definitions of countercultural aesthetic experimentation. Through EAT,
Schneemann received access to equipment and technicians in support of her multimedia work Snows (1967). By 1970, the trajectories of Schneemann and EAT were in stark contrast. While each produced “electronic activation rooms” of a kind, their projects operated on vastly divergent scales of economy—EAT enjoyed million-dollar sponsorship from a multinational corporation; Schneemann and Lifton rewired a discarded grocery store computer and slept in the exhibition space for lack of money for a hotel—and we find a provocative contrast between their discursive programs. As shown in documents from the EAT archives held by the Museum of Modern Art, EAT’s fulsome circumstances did not result in critical results. In sum, the Pavilion suffered a severe crisis of content. The renowned avant-garde composer La Monte Young, for example, produced sound collages based on the theme of “four seasons”—spring, summer, autumn, and winter—something like sonic Hallmark cards emanating from the floor of the aluminum and plexiglas environment decidedly void of any natural contingency, a proposal of simplistic contrast. Breer, a producer of sophisticated experiments in animation and kinetic sculpture, contributed his floats, an apparently playful, benign operation that, I will argue, exemplifies how little was expected of the Pavilion audience, of the technocratic subject at large.
Klüver appears as a good-intentioned if ill-advised bureaucrat who was drawn deeply into the administration of art. Across his applications to a range of private foundations and governmental agencies in the United States and abroad, Klüver became
133 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 preoccupied with structures of cultural production at the expense of artwork in any meaningful sense. Through close analysis of the distinctions between Schneemann’s
Electronic Activation Room and Klüver’s Pavilion, we see that “In the world of the pavilion, the artist and the social engineer were one,” as Turner concludes.53 And further,
Schneemann understood this equivalence on urgent terms of technical-libidinal determination. Exactly where claims to undifferentiated, universalized collectivity emerged, Schneemann found a “forest of technological wonders” already fraught by exclusion on terms of gender and sexuality. The problem, as posed in the Electronic
Activation Room, was not that the engineers were acting as artists; rather that artists and engineers were committed to a modality of production premised on overabundant enamor for technologies of control in the service of severely delimited notion of self- determination.
Thus Schneemann’s regard for technology and its effects on the body may be seen to reach a culmination with Interior Scroll. Interior Scroll appears at the end of a period in the artist’s career in which she immersed herself in discourses of cybernetics and information theory. Her Meat Systems exemplify this research. To the right of her sketch, she wrote “the message,” underlined. For Schneemann, women’s bodies had always been the medium of a limited series of messages: house-wife, maid, model, muse. “Control and communication in the animal and machine,” as Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics, was a conceit of male privilege. Schneemann read from the scroll, her dialogue with “a happy man/ a structuralist filmmaker”: “he said we can be friends/ equally though we are
53 Turner, “The Corporation and the Counterculture,” 76.
134 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 not artists/ equally I said we cannot/ be friends equally and we/ cannot be artists equally.”54 For Schneemann, any theory of messages could not be disentangled from her lived circumstances of technical-libidinal overdetermination. The popular McLuhan jargon and cybernetic utopias were exactly that: jargon and utopias. They demanded evisceration. In Schneemann’s reflection, Interior Scroll emerged from the “power and possession of naming—the movement from internal thought to external signification.”55
The parameters of that movement were already fraught by what was disavowed, the unthought brutal dailiness. Schneemann’s survival depended on the production of new
“gesture units,” to follow her writing on Lateral Splay, within and without the ascendant regimes of technological fetishism.
10. Libidinal Engineering
In Schneemann’s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s, we find a radical reconfiguration of the relation between artists’ medium and electronic mass media. By means of the historical context of automatic control, we find something less akin to the spectacular arrays of VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, and something more like the
“remarkable apparatus” described in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: that is, the notion of medium as a killing machine. Consider another collage made by Schneemann at the same time as the Electronic Activation Room, entitled Study for Testing Energy (1970). We see a woman, flanked by wings of ripped classified advertisements soliciting “mature and
54 Schneemann, “Scroll #2” (1975), in “Interior Scroll,” Imaging Her Erotics, 159-160.
55 Schneemann, “Interior Scroll,” Imaging Her Erotics, 154.
135 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 intelligent young women,” “secretary,” “copy girl.” In a turn on perspectival space, the woman is affixed as if to stand on top of an electrical transformer while she is also fixed to the surface plane of the collage itself by a wire support rod. The rod pierces the woman’s chest like an entomologist’s pin. She is stuck through like a bug. Set as she is on the transformer, her body contorted, another violence is suggested: she seems shocked, riddled with convulsions induced by a charge from the transformer. A man, an electrical engineer, tinkers below. What occurs in representation in the collage is conceived in affective presentation in the Meat System. Schneemann’s project suggests that we might, to follow Kafka, find some understanding through the wounds inflicted by our control systems. “There would be no point in telling him,” the officer says of the prisoner trapped within the Apparatus that enacts both judgement and execution. “He’ll learn it on his body.”56 In Kafka’s story, the epiphany sought after by the devoted officer in his merger with the Apparatus is answered by way of an iron spike through his head. In
Schneemann’s libidinal engineering, her Electronic Activation Room, we find a correlative working-through of the restive materialism that troubles any attributions of liberatory potential to a machine.
Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room makes a cogent turn on “thinking about the unthinkable.” The work’s stakes are set in the dynamic of thought and unthought. Servomechanism: a “tremendous advance in the automatic control art,” to recall Warren Weaver, a discrete invention nurtured in the laboratories of MIT and Bell
Telephone. However, as we learn at the end of Kafka’s story that the murderous apparatus
56 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” (1919), in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), 145.
136 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 is but a symptom of a generalized seduction of the penal colony inhabitants by authoritarian power, the servomechanism is yet one more iteration in the condition of control societies. By these terms we may begin to understand Schneemann’s process from
Meat Joy to Meat System.
137 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 4.
Tom Sherman and the Influencing Machines
“‘Boy, you get offered some shitty choices,’ a Marine once said to me, and I couldn’t help but feel that what he really meant was that you didn’t get offered any at all. Specifically, he was just talking about a couple of C-ration cans, ‘dinner,’ but considering his young life you couldn’t blame him for thinking that if he knew one thing for sure, it was that there was no one anywhere who cared less about what he wanted. There wasn’t anybody he wanted to thank for his food, but he was grateful that he was still alive to eat it, that the motherfucker hadn’t scarfed him up first. He hadn’t been anything but tired and scared for six months and he’s lost a lot, mostly people, and seen far too much, but he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself.”
— Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977)1
1. This message is about the condition of your body
In December 1970, Tom Sherman induced himself to black-out by deep breathing. In his performance work entitled simply Hyperventilation, he turned a method of self- improvement common to meditation or yoga into one of self-harm. Sherman regimented his breathing into an unnatural rhythm, overwhelming his autonomic nervous system. He positioned himself between function and dysfunction, between control and its loss. In this work, his first video performance, Sherman presses himself to the limits of corporeal stamina. The project is devoted not to “expanded consciousness,” but rather to the threat of its implosion, a hyperbolic struggle to manage psychophysical rapport with his environment—not euphoria but the paranoia of infiltration. Twenty-three years old in
1 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1977), 14.
138 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1970, Sherman had just graduated with a BFA from Eastern
Michigan University. He was offered scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, but accepted a place in the Otis Institute of Art in Los Angeles. Lasting only a few weeks in
LA, Sherman returned to Ypsilanti and took up his old job at the campus bookstore. He received one medical deferment from the Selective Service, but knew that chances were high that he would be called up for military service, and Vietnam.2 In late October 1971,
Sherman departed for London, Ontario.
As this chapter explores Sherman’s work of the 1970s, we situate his performances, closed-circuit video implementations, and sculptures, within a larger history of Cold War media culture, in particular mind control, or the mind itself as a medium. Especially, as we work through Sherman’s use of video, we will explore the implications of Sherman’s understanding of video not as a discrete technology but rather as a modality of control. Where Gene Youngblood’s definition of expanded cinema as a
“process of becoming” will be a crucial precedent for understanding Sherman’s engagement with cybernetics and information theory, Youngblood’s formulation seems a utopic fantasy against Sherman’s self-inflicted trauma in Hyperventilation and other works challenging the rhetorics of expansion and multimedia practices. Through
Sherman’s propositions, in his artworks and his writings, we find an idiosyncratic assemblage of cybernetics, systems research, and psychology, by which Sherman materializes the maturation of automatic control from discrete devices to lived condition, where consciousness is not expanded, but rather threatened with extinguishment.
2 Sherman, The Faraday Cage, 24.
139 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 2. The Ordinary Ping-Pong Ball, Cut in Half, Provides a Source of Even White Light
(1975)
Out from the photograph he faces us directly. In crisp focus and bright contrast, the man bares his face to us. The photograph is cropped closely around his head: its composition is reminiscent of official, government-issued identification. One may even imagine that this is a mug shot in some document of culpability. His mouth is pursed in concentration.
A spot of highlight from a standard fill-light at three-quarter position may be seen on the left side of his nose; pores are just visible in the full illumination. His shoulders are blurred, accentuating his seeking posture, his slight lean towards us. The word “VIDEO,” from the Latin “I see,” occupies a third of the cover’s space. The word holds him back, a typographical barrier. It meets the man just below his lips in a composition that evokes a kind of comic propaganda. One cannot escape without acknowledging the perfectly circumscribed form of the white orbs set where his eyes would be expected to transmit an assertive gaze. These white orbs, almost without shadow, lock upon a viewer. Their bright solidity generates an uncanny arrest: the presence of these twinned orbs is amplified at the absence of the man’s eyes. The photograph is commanding, unforgettable. And it holds a fascinating contradiction at its center—or, more accurately, its centers.
The photograph is of the artist Tom Sherman in a ganzfeld, or “total-field,” experiment. Ganzfeld, developed in the 1930s by the German psychologist and pioneer of
Gestalt psychology Wolfgang Metzger, is a means to amplify interior perception.3 By
3 See Wolfgang Metzger, “Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld,” Psychologische Forschung 13 (1930): 6-29.
140 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 minimizing sensory inputs, a participant may achieve a heightened state of awareness of one’s internal psycho-physiological system and its relation to the environment, immediate and cosmic: “expanded consciousness” according to the phrase of the 1960s and 70s counterculture in which Gestalt psychology received renewed attention in pseudoscientific and parapsychological contexts amplified by hallucinogens. In
Sherman’s depicted state, what the artist seeks is precisely the temporary extinguishment of external visual information (that is, his photographer, and by extension, us, his anticipated audience, seeing him). Due to the halved ping-pong ball set into his eye- sockets, our image, for Sherman, would disintegrate into a uniform field of white light, a blank array to his starved eyes. We would be invisible to him, out of sight. Not even a specter.
In this key image of the Toronto video scene, on the cover of one of the most important publications of postwar avant-garde media art, Sherman faces us, with apparent paradox, as a defiant, impenetrable screen. The nightmarish loss of consciousness of
Hyperventilation finds a cool, still complement in the white expanse of Sherman’s ganzfeld experiment: a white out. How did a photograph of Sherman in a ganzfeld experiment come to be appear on the cover of the book Video by Artists as the defining image of video art?
Video by Artists was published in 1976 in an edition of one thousand by Art
Metropole in Toronto. The artist AA Bronson, a founder of Art Metropole, and a member
141 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 of the collective General Idea, designed the book.4 Bronson invited Sherman to share his ganzfeld photographs, which were circulating as the self-published photocopy posters in the Toronto art community under a title constituted by descriptive, literal language: The
Ordinary Ping-Pong Ball, Cut in Half, Provides a Source of Even White Light (1975).
The curator Peggy Gale edited Video by Artists. Gale had recently curated the show
Videoscape at the Art Gallery of Ontario (November 20, 1974–April 1, 1975), the first museum exhibition devoted to video art in Canada. She was just beginning her renowned career as an art historian, critic, and curator. Video by Artists is one of the first major publications devoted to artists’ experiments with video technology: “a source book for the medium.”5 The book includes copiously illustrated portfolios and full curriculum vita from sixteen international artists and collectives. Among those featured include Ant
Farm, the San Francisco-based collective; David Askevold, leader of the famed
“Projects” classes at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax; General Idea;
Dan Graham; Lisa Steele; Vincent Trasov (known as “Mr. Peanut”), a founding member of the Western Front artist-run center in Vancouver; and the collective W.O.R.K.S. (“We
Ourselves Roughly Know Something”), whose profile includes an interview between
4 The history of Art Metropole, General Idea, their publications, and the broader culture of artist-run spaces, may be found in Gabrielle Detterer and Maurizio Nannucci, ed. Artist-Run Spaces: Nonprofit Collective Organizations in the 1960s and 1970s (Zürich: JRP | Ringier, 2012); Jeff Khonsary and Kristina Lee Podesva, ed. Institutions by Artists (Vancouver: Fillip Editions, 2012); Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Kitty Scott and Jonathan Shaughnessy, Art Metropole: The Top 100, exh. cat. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006); Luis Jacob, ed. Golden Streams: Artists’ Collaboration and Exchange in the 70s (Mississauga: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
5 Peggy Gale, “All these years: Early Toronto Video,” 6. See Chris Gehman, ed. Explosion in the Movie Machine: Essays and Documents on Toronto Artists' Film and Video (Toronto: Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), Images Festival, and YYZ Books, 2013).
142 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 W.O.R.K.S. member Clive Robertson and Willoughby Sharp. Contributors to the essay section include Les Levine, Askevold, Gale, Graham, Bronson, and Jean-Pierre Boyer.
An extensive bibliography concludes the book. Sherman provided the introduction, constituted by previously distinct text works entitled “Adjusting a Colour
Television” (1975) and “Voluntary Handcuffs” (1975).6 His introduction was complemented by another photograph from his ganzfeld action.
Video by Artists is a selective encapsulation of the state of the culture, a rich survey that asserts video as a crucial tool for advanced art. Across the book’s pages, video is celebrated as a binding premise for disparate aesthetic agendas. And it asserts video as a powerful social mechanism by which communal action may be instigated. One primary concern shared by the artists and essayists, a concern defining of avant-garde media cultures at large, is the necessity for an analysis of and resistance to dominant modes of media production, namely commercial television and cinema of the American studio system.
Video by Artists was a major contribution in a cumulative blossoming of publications that defined avant-garde media cultures of the 1960s and 70s. In 1970, Gene
Youngblood published his canonical book Expanded Cinema. Liza Béar and Willoughby
Sharp devoted Avalanche number 9 (May/June 1974), the first newspaper-format issue, to
“Video Performance.” Also in 1974, the catalog to accompany the exhibition Videoscape was published by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Curated by Gale, Videoscape included 49
6 “Adjusting a Colour Television” (1975) and “Voluntary Handcuffs” (1975) in Tom Sherman, Cultural Engineering, ed. Willard Holmes, exhibition catalogue (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1980), 47 and 91-92, respectively.
143 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Canadian artists—“a number surprising to everyone,” she recalls—and five Americans, all based in New York.7 In early 1975, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania mounted the exhibition Video Art, which subsequently traveled to the
Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Video Art included over eighty artists. Each was represented in a half-page profile in the catalogue’s distinct 11 x 8.5- inch design. In 1976, the Raindance Foundation in New York, publisher of the influential video periodical Radical Software (1970–74), issued Video Art: An Anthology, a two hundred and eighty-six-page book surveying the work of seventy-three international artists. Bibliographies in these publications include materials dating to as early as 1965. It was in that year that Nam June Paik allegedly made the first work of video art, a recording of Pope Paul IV’s visit to New York, with a prototype of the Sony CV-2400
Portapak video system. These histories continue to be charted and contested.8 In 1974, in
7 Gale, “All These Years: Early Toronto Video,” 1.
8 In 2007, Tom Sherman observed that Nam June Paik did not have access to the Sony Portapak CV-2400, released two years later in 1967. In his essay “The Premature Birth of Video Art,” Sherman writes: “Some have speculated that Paik had his hands on an early prototype of the Sony Portapak (the CV-2400), sent to him from Japan. Shigeko Kubota, Paik's wife, told Skip Blumberg that Nam June's older brother sent him a CV-2400 from Japan in 1965. This cannot have happened, as according to Shuya Abe, Paik's long-time friend and engineer-collaborator on the Paik-Abe synthesizer, the CV-2400 Portapak was released in the US first, not Japan, in 1967. Sony's product archives back this up. There were no battery-powered Sony Portapaks available in 1965.” See Tom Sherman, “The Premature Birth of Video Art,”
144 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “A New Medium,” her essay for the Videoscape catalog, Gale writes: “There must be more curiosity and less information today about video than about any other single medium for artistic expression. In a restless era which tediously proclaims that ‘painting is dead’ and pursues sculpture out into the valleys and deserts, artists seek out new forms that might offer an opportunity for breakthrough into a different kind of sensibility.”9 By
1976, artists’ use of video accumulated a considerable amount of information.
Tom Sherman is one participant who found in the use of the video not so much expanded consciousness as its implosion. On the cover of Video by Artists, a book celebrating artists’ innovations with powerful new electronic moving image technologies, we see an artist closing down his inputs, as it were. The artist retreats into himself while his representation is set upon by mechanical reproduction, one thousand books in all— while he is motivated as representative of the radical, expansive capabilities of the new medium. In contradistinction to the similarly composed celebrity-profile covers of
Avalanche magazine, Sherman enacts a means to intensified sensitivity to his internal systems and his external environment—to expanded consciousness—at the expense of visual rapport with his viewers, his presumed environment, a video audience. He does not share of himself, rather reinforces his separation. His interior experience is a self-display that refuses intersubjective relation. Sherman stages a classic action of the counterculture so to subvert one of its founding conceits. What emerges from Sherman’s image is not euphoria, but as I will argue throughout this chapter, a paranoia of infiltration distinctive to the Cold War era.
9 Peggy Gale, “A New Medium,” in Videoscape, exhibition catalogue (Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1974), no pagination.
145 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Video is not a specific tool or instrument for Sherman, but rather a modality of control. The ganzfeld action featured on the cover of Video by Artists, and other projects from the 1970s—his Hyperventilation performances of 1970-71, his construction of an
Orgone Energy Accumulator and a Faraday Cage in 1973, his Breathing Apparatus project of 1974, and his speculative essay “The Art-Style Computer Processing System” of 1974—do not formulate video as a discrete medium with inherent characteristics or specific technical capabilities. Instead, “video” is a process of structuring tolerances— and resistances—in the senses of vision and hearing, via a certain arrangement of apparatuses. Through a range of materials, Sherman defines video as a relation of power enacted on the psychophysical character of a subject. In this way, his work advances a premise of multimedia experimentation that complicates contemporaneous discourses on expanded cinema, at the time reaching their apex of their cultural prominence, as well as art historical debates on the essential attributes of a medium, especially as they pertain to video. Therefore, at stake here is not a definition of expanded cinema—not “what” nor even “where” is expanded cinema—but rather under what conditions and for what purposes were particular discourses of expanded cinema activated?
By means of Sherman’s work we confront a question of determination: how is a medium or a practice determined by its material condition and historical situation? An important guide for answering this inquiry will be Raymond Williams’s complication of the language of “determining base.” As Williams emphasizes, the language of determination in cultural analysis too often bears its idealistic, theological inheritance, determination as “an external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally
146 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 controls a subsequent activity.” Against this inheritance, Williams proposes a different mode of determination or effect, one that derives from the experience of social practice,
“a notion of determination as setting limits, exerting pressures.”10 Through examination of the determining pressures and limits of Sherman’s work, we find resonances within a larger field of Cold War cultural history—in particular, mind control. Sherman’s work gives a view to a particular apprehension around the integrity of the subject, the subject as constituted by competing forces, psychic and physical. Video offers a particular modality of control through which Sherman hyperbolizes acute anxieties of the nascent information environment. It is through Sherman’s work that we may understand the maturation of automatic control from discrete devices to lived condition.
Video as technology, then, could be perceived as part of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno had critiqued as Enlightenment’s “disenchantment of the world,” its instrumentalization of reason. For Horkheimer and Adorno, technology is the
“essence” of instrumental reason, of knowledge as domination over nature: “It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of labor of others, capital.”11 Sherman, I would argue, sets his aesthetic experimentation on the particular “method” of video-as-technology, a position of generative ambivalence.
Video’s production of concepts and images, of the joy or rather the “high” of understanding, are understood to be part and parcel of the compulsions of its particular
10 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review (November-December 1973): 4.
11 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 2.
147 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 social conditions—that is, to the reinforcement of those conditions, to the production of its own image, again and again. We find Sherman in this period utilizing material from the history of science and technology as a means of critical distance against contemporary conditions of technocratic determination. Sherman’s work evinces an idiosyncratic assemblage of cybernetics, systems research, and psychology into a kind of praxis of psychophysics. In the case of Sherman’s image on the cover of Video by Artists, his effort may be understood through contrast with a prominent appearance in the popular imagination of another ganzfeld action ten years earlier.
3. “Equipment for living,” or What Have They Built You To Do?
The September 8, 1966, issue of LIFE Magazine features a cover story on “New
Experience that Bombards the Senses: LSD Art.” The cover displays a man, seated and bare-chested, his eyes covered with translucent hemispheric goggles. He is awash in concentrated red light. Tendrils of light in blue, yellow, and white tones at his left and right further emphasize a viewer’s focus on his head. His head is at the juncture of diagonal and vertical seams in the light, his forehead—his third eye—a biological transceiver at the center-point of this irradiating spectacle. His face is still, poised, meditative. He sits back comfortably on a simple canvas chair. He is self-assured, confident, at once in full command of the composition and indifferent to his environment.
With his defined abdominals, broad shoulders, and full but trim hair and beard, the man is a pin-up cut to the measure of American counterculture fantasy, a model “voyager” for
148 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 those who might want “to blast off into inner space.”12 We face a chill Vitruvian Man for the stoned-out crowd.
He is the artist Richard Aldcroft presented in use of his device the Infinity
Projector, also called the Infinity Machine. The LIFE article explains, “He sees separate images with each eye and his mind tries to fuse them. The effort disrupts his sense of time and place and produces the disorientation which is basic to the psychedelic experience. Color patterns appear unexpectedly, assaulting his double fields of vision.
They can be ecstatically beautiful—or terrifying.”13 The machine, the reporter notes, performs nightly in Aldcroft’s New York loft. In the article, three more photographs of
Aldcroft’s head, in close-up centered in abstract rainbows, are presented. Prominent in the article is a photograph from the “be-in” We Are All One, a multimedia event produced by USCO, the prominent counterculture group led by Gerd Stern, for the discotheque The
World in Garden City, New York. The World commissioned USCO to produce 2,000 slides, two-and-a-half hours of 16 mm film, and a control console to operate the projections. “The way things have been going, psychedelic art was bound to come about,” the reporter explains. “It is a logical merging of routes that art has been traveling for half a century.”14 The article confers psychedelia not only with artistic continuity but historical inevitability, a culmination from Dada’s “anarchical performances” to Robert
Rauschenberg’s “Combines” and Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” to Op art and kinetic art.
“In fact, just about everything going today is apt to be grist for the psychedelic art mill.
12 “Psychedelic Art,” LIFE Magazine (9 September 1966): 64.
13 “Psychedelic Art,” LIFE, 64.
14 “Psychedelic Art,” LIFE, 68.
149 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 The USCO group, in particular, shifts effortlessly from multichannel audio hookups to woven rugs, from ‘proving out’ Marshall McLuhan’s theories on media to projecting
Hindu philosophies.”15 Later in 1966, the writer and filmmaker Gordon Ball interviewed
Aldcroft for the magazine Film Culture, the self-proclaimed critical arbiter of the underground film scene—that is, for an audience distinct from the aspirational middle- class, mainstream readership of LIFE. The interview appeared in Film Culture 43, a special issue devoted to Expanded Arts, dated Winter 1966 but released in the summer of
1967. The interview, entitled “Triptape,” is worth extended consideration, for its display of internal conflicts within the discourses of psychedelic art and expanded cinema provides further illumination in our examination of Sherman’s work.
In the interview, Aldcroft describes the manner in which he devised the Infinity
Projector, here called the Infinity Machine. He conceived of the first “machine” from a common means of generating light show effects in the era, a photographic enlarger. “One of the first machines happened to come about on an enlarger stage when I put film in a transparent container.” What follows is a quintessential, near hyperbolic, monologue on counterculture fantasies that would be disturbingly humorous in its implications, if this
“quiet, thoughtful” man were not so earnest.16 “Technologists need to take LSD and direct their consciousness into a program of reorganization,” he declares, and advocates for the entire reorganization of culture at large. “The equipment that humans have for living—namely houses, communication, transportation, food, clothing, utilities—should
15 “Psychedelic Art,” LIFE, 68.
16 Gordon Ball, ’66 Frames (St. Paul, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 1999), 238.
150 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 be highly reorganized.” The reorganization, he proposes, can be realized by means of extrapolating R. Buckminster Fuller’s distinctive geodesic domes into spherical structures. The geodesic spheres would then be cast out on water like giant buoys.
“The housing of the future will consist of hydraulic housing, not housing on earth but housing on water. We’ll have a water cushion to support the housing structure. And all shorelines will be points of food distribution; food will be cultivated inland, conveyance units will take it to the shoreline, and it will be distributed by hydraulic food conveying units to the dwelling units. …” Aldcroft notes that these geodesic spheres will be “completely air conditioned. … Weather control is important.” Perhaps with a twinge of self-consciousness at the ambitious scale of his proposal, he works to clarify. “But seriously, the essential thing is control of the weather,
“because once you’re in your air-conditioned dwelling unit, free from the destructive forces of the weather, you can even grow your own crops—fruits and vegetables growing all year ‘round, enough food to feed all the people living in that unit. A self-contained living unit. People can live on, in the daylight level in perfect comfort. And in the larger ones you could have a nuclear generators of electricity; even in the small ones you could have a stat 3 nuclear generator. They’re small enough now—they could fit into a station wagon.”
Ball: “And you think this can all come about from heightened consciousness through LSD?”
Aldcroft: “Yes, that’s right. LSD can put the technologists onto the problem of human survival, and that’s how it will be answered. The only way.”
Ball: “But what’s going to make these technologists want to turn on in the first place?”
151 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Aldcroft: “Through doing things like listening to this tape, through turning on to what technology can do to design.”17
Aldcroft’s proposal exhibits key aspects of the counterculture imagination. The
“perfect comfort” of the geodesic spheres materializes a fantasy of escape, a romance of self-determination. LSD becomes the essential “equipment for living,” a necessary reorganization of the mind for the reorganization of civilization. His system of buoyant conveyance units suggests an isolated existence unburdened by the interference of not only other people but also the contingencies of climate. Aldcroft’s primary concern is the weather. For Aldcroft and his countercultural imaginary, I would argue, this concern about the unpredictability of weather refers to a deeper—and disavowed—anxiety about socio-political unrest, such as the violence following the Civil Rights Act made law in
July 1964, and, closer to his home, the riots in the predominantly black neighborhoods of
Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant that followed days after, and the riots in many other cities throughout the northeast that summer. Aldcroft’s assertion for “control of the weather,” his preoccupation with air-conditioning and self-sustaining agriculture, suggests a crucial displacement of politics into natural history, a false totality for a population of one: Paul Edwards’s “closed world” as a rudderless hamster ball occupied by a hallucinating castaway.
Social change is reduced to terms of meteorology. Symptomatic of a more generalized refusal of participation in the political process, Aldcroft proposes ever-more
17 Gordon Ball, “Triptape: An Interview with Richard Aldcroft,” Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966/ Summer 1967): 4.
152 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 elaborate accommodations traded against the promise of technological innovation. Easier, it seems, to propose nuclear-powered habitats tossed among lakes and oceans than to effect social change. We find a message-in-a-bottle directed only to his self-interests.
Control is desired for its own sake. “You don’t need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan sang in Subterranean Homesick Blues, released in 1965. The lyric would serve as the basis for the name taken by the radical militant wing of the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS): the Weathermen and subsequently the Weather
Underground. No need for a weatherman to know that change is in the air. However, for
Aldcroft and the countercultural imaginary, social change is diminished to a matter of air.
In Aldcroft, we find a premier, if outlandish, specimen of what Fred Turner calls the “New Communalist,” a figure of the 1960s and 70s distinguished by, on the one hand, disenchantment with the political activism of the New Left, and, on the other, embrace of technologically-aided redefinition of social order at the largest scale.18 The New
Communalists refused the given civic governing processes, while embracing the technological and discursive products of wartime operations research, such as cybernetics and systems theory. For those who departed the cities to build alternative social structures on rural communes or who ingested hallucinogens as a means of psychic escape, this was not a contradiction but rather the basis for an ethos offering an attractive resolution between the polemical, often violent, condition of the social climate, and the perceived amelioration possible through innovations in communications technologies, if applied with benevolent egalitarianism. A more personal, direct form of power was anticipated.
18 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.
153 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “Even as their peers organized political parties and marched against the Vietnam War,” the New Communalists “turned away from political action and toward technology and the transformation of consciousness as the primary sources of social change.”19 Harmony could be achieved through deployment of “small-scale technologies—ranging from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, slide projectors, and LSD—to bring people together and allow them to experience their common humanity.”20 However, this “common humanity” was represented in selective terms of rustic self-determination and personal empowerment that underscored a holism particular to the interests of white, affluent, heterosexual men. As Turner observes, commune culture “did not so much leave suburban gender relations behind as recreate them within a frontier fantasy.”21 Further, the “frontier” to which the New Communalists escaped was often already residence for populations who were socially and economically precluded from urban living—
Hispanics, Native Americans, African Americans—and “their arrival tapped into memories of very old patterns of colonization and migration.”22 The New Communalists’ frontier fantasy and vernacular systems theory flourished into a potent technocratic utopianism that espoused universalism on rhetoric enabled by socio-economic exception.
To refuse participation was to presume certain conditions for the possibility of choosing to refuse.
19 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 4.
20 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 4.
21 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 77.
22 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 78.
154 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 The primary materialization of the New Communalist ethos was the Whole Earth
Catalog, first published in 1968. “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it,” wrote
Stewart Brand in the first issue of the Catalog, his clever tone crystallizing the pleasurable burden of responsibility for devising new modes of living. The ethos is encapsulated in the phrase “Workers of the world, disperse,” a deliberate inversion of the revolutionary phrase “workers of the world, unite.” The phrase is attributed to Fred
Richardson, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. The words are presented in small font as a kind of caption to a photograph of the Drop City commune in Colorado. The cluster of structures is isolated in a harsh, desert landscape, the fragile outpost almost swallowed by the ominous mountain range behind. Across the top of the expansive image is the text
“Production in the Desert.” The image was published in the Supplement to the Whole
Earth Catalog, 1971. In the photograph, the dwarfed, indistinct white domes of the Drop
City complex might be mistaken for the geodesic radomes of the isolated outposts in the
Distant Early Warning Line stations in the Cold War air defense network spread across the Arctic desert—a connection entirely intended by the Catalog’s producers. As Turner argues, “to build and inhabit a dome was not only to enter into contact with mystical systems, or to come closer to personal or transpersonal communion; it was also to play at being an engineer, a scientist, a master of technology.”23 In this photomontage we find an encapsulation of the technologically-substantiated sublime to which Aldcroft, Brand, and their cohort aspired: detached from social and political conditions of production, referenced only to the degree that it might reinforce their immediate wishes. “Dispersal”
23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 95.
155 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 was conceived in ratio to rhetoric of interconnectivity; isolation in ratio to self- promotion. The communards, envisioning themselves as “well-equipped refugees of technocracy,” would conceive an equivalence between rustic self-determination and the most advanced technologies of the day, contingent upon a fine arrangement of all-too- familiar disavowals and strategic elisions: “he is an Indian; he is also an engineer.”24
Brand called this arrangement “transcendental planning.”25
Avowedly anti-authoritarian, their projects belie a distinctive egotism resting on idealist presumptions of escape, an escape reinforced by an identification with their own power, a network not of outward-directed relation but rather of self-regard. The cover of the Whole Earth Catalog reads “Access to tools” alongside the famed photograph of the
Planet Earth set in the utter darkness of space. The workings of the ethos therein will be devoted to instrumentalization of the Earth itself, by means of elaborate infrastructures of desire, looking back upon the “blue marble” with desire for control without responsibility. Such a program, as Turner shows, will be fulfilled a generation later in the embrace of libertarian policies through discourses of digital utopianism in the 1990s. If
Aldcroft’s elaborate network of nuclear-powered, ocean-faring, geodesic habitats seems an extreme example of the New Communalist imagination, consider that Brand is today, presently involved in the “de-extinction” of the woolly mammoth through bio- engineering as a means of solving the deleterious effects of climate change. “We’ve framed it in terms of conservation. We’re bringing back the mammoth to restore the
24 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 78 and 85.
25 Stewart Brand, cited by Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 90.
156 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 steppe in the Arctic. One or two mammoths is not a success. 100,000 mammoths is a success.”26 Thus, in a neat echo of Aldcroft fifty years later, it is easier for Brand to imagine the genetic engineering, fabrication, and reintroduction of a long-gone species than to effect meaningful change through civic process.
“For the New Communalists, the key to social change was not politics, but mind.”27 They espoused transcendental rhetoric of visionary experience in pursuit of
“what they imagined to be pre-industrial forms of intimacy and egalitarian rule,” while also embracing “knowledge and collaborative styles of knowledge work that had emerged at the heart of mainstream American research and industrial culture during World War
II.”28 Cybernetics and systems theory—products from the center of the defense industries
—offered “an ideological alternative” to authoritarian hierarchy.29 Effective management of information was concomitant with self-interest, enabled by access to telecommunications technology, in material or in discursive form. The Catalog’s contents were “mechanisms that transformed their users into actors in the dramatic myths of
American individualism.” Self-sufficiency was coextensive with the packaging of subjectivity itself. The more personal, direct power sought by Brand was evermore bound to “access to tools”—that is, to effective instrumentalization of the self.
26 Stewart Brand in Nathaniel Rich, “The New Origin of the Species,” The New York Times Magazine, 2 March 2014.
27 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 36.
28 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 37.
29 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 38.
157 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 The mind as medium: the notion has an especially fraught status in the Cold War period. Aldcroft’s proposal for LSD as “equipment for living,” for necessary reorganization of the mind, finds its immediate, darker precedent in the pervasive discourse of mind control, of “brainwashing.” On December 22, 1974, The New York
Times presented on its front page an article detailing operations by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted within the United States, in direct violation of the
Agency’s charter.30 Written by the prominent journalist Seymour Hirsch, who in
November 1969 had authored the first reports on the My Lai Massacre, the article precipitated further investigation into covert actions by the CIA against American citizens, investigations which would be culminate in the United States Senate Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
(Church Committee) in 1975. One of the most sensational revelations of this scrutiny was that of Project MK-ULTRA, in which the CIA experimented on human subjects with psychoactive substances such as LSD in hopes of developing an effective method of behavior modification. The LSD experiments of Project MK-ULTRA had been common knowledge amongst the counterculture, in particular through Ken Kesey’s writings and the “Acid Tests” he conducted with the Merry Pranksters.
Historian Timothy Melley has recently argued for brainwashing as a “strategic fiction” of the Cold War with continued contemporary ramifications.31 “Brainwashing has
30 Seymour M. Hirsch, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents, in Nixon Years,” The New York Times, 22 December 1974, 1.
31 Timothy Melley, “Brain Warfare: The Cover Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War,” Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011), 31.
158 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 been an appealing—if terrifying—fantasy because it functioned as a crude theory of ideology.”32 According to Melley, the rise of a discourse of brainwashing in the United
States during the early years of the Cold War speaks to not only the increasingly felt necessity for a theory of social influence, but also a context where such theorization could not take place—or rather, were displaced. If the Cold War prohibited Marxist concepts of ideology and other structural analyses of social influence and determination, the fiction of brainwashing served as a powerfully seductive answer to the problem of influence, moving the terrain of analysis - and fantasy - from the social to the psychological and technological: ideology as mind control. “It ‘explained’ ideological difference and conditioning as the result not of social institutions but of malevolent intentions—thus preserving a crucial feature of liberal individualism at a moment when it seemed threatened by both Communism and mass culture.”33 Melley discovers a ‘reality’ of brainwashing in CIA documents during the early years of the Cold War—initially as propaganda, a strategic fiction to incite public fear of control, then ‘realized’ as a method of torture or “enhanced interrogation,” “not a new method, just a brutal combination of isolation, physical deprivation, and the nearly interminable revision of a personal confession.”34 By the 1960s, brainwashing would become a potent vernacular metaphor for various functions of the state, bureaucracies and corporations, advertising and mass culture as technologies of mass indoctrination. “The discourse was thereby converted from a conservative hysteria about foreign enemies to a liberal attack on corporate power,
32 Melley, “Brain Warfare,” 27.
33 Melley, “Brain Warfare,” 27.
34 Melley, “Brain Warfare,” 29.
159 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 political conformity, and social conditioning.”35 I would argue that we can discover the legacy of this discourse of brainwashing and its disavowal of structural analyses of social influence and determination in contemporary impasses of media theory and cultural analyses. John Durham Peters, for one, has recently underscored how for “American
Media Theory” the charge of “technological determinism” currently bears the connotation of “depraved wickedness” (comparable to a “puppy strangler”), a negative connotation that comes into focus in the 1960s as technological determinism is equated with both a technophilia and a fatalism that voids individual, human agency.36 This also returns us to our earlier discussion of Raymond Williams and his call for a more complex understanding of the language of “determining base”—a question then not only of methodology but also of history.
“What have they built you to do?” asks Marco (Frank Sinatra) of Shaw (Laurence
Harvey), in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), his question encapsulating the horror— and the fascination—of influence as infiltration. The scene cuts back and forth from a close-up of Shaw’s expressionless, zombie-like face to Marco’s transfixed face: a kind of heightening of the senses faced by its foreclosure. The crux of the scene is the transfixed expression of the latter, the astonishment but also the revulsion, the epiphany, the high:
Marco is thoroughly impressed at this well-built machine that is both his friend Shaw and is not, the question is not what have they built you to do? but rather a statement of awe,
35 Melley, “Brain Warfare,” 26.
36 John Durham Peters, “Two Cheers for Technological Determinism,” public presentation in the symposium Media Histories: Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality, Columbia University, New York, 26 March 2011.
160 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 what have they built you to do…! In the ganzfeld work of the Infinity Machine, we could argue that Aldcroft had produced a kind of homemade mind control machine as self- inoculation against influence, not only for the ultimate high of “expanded consciousness” but as the medium for control, a do-it-yourself brainwashing device to meet the fear of control with more control of one’s own. Sherman’s turn of the ganzfeld action brings forth the dark underside of such aspirations for the medium of the mind in expanded cinema. As noted earlier, in Sherman’s re-staging of a classic action of the counterculture, what emerges is not so much euphoria as a paranoia of infiltration distinctive to the Cold
War era.
4. Expanded Cinema: “The nervous system of mankind”
Andrew Uroskie observes that the apparent novelty of expanded cinema was possible only due to a “particularly acute form of historical amnesia.”37 “Rhetoric of immersion” was a commonplace well before the term “expanded cinema” was in circulation.38 The kind of “active” spectatorship touted in multimedia works of the era had precedent in aspirations reinvented several times over at World Expositions, such as Raoul Grimoin-
Sanson’s Cinéorama of 1897 and Fred Waller’s Vitarama system presented in the
Perisphere at the 1939 Fair. Such rhetoric of maximal stimulation was also present in attempts by Hollywood studios to compete with television in the 1950s with various products of enlargement such as Cinerama, Todd-AO, and CinemaScope. The motivator
37 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 21.
38 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 22.
161 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 of the purportedly more active, liberated spectator, Uroskie observes, was a product of managing the proliferation of visual data generated by the multimedia technology.
Moreover, I would further argue, expanded cinema offers not so much an innovation in media application as a symptom of untenable processes of control.
Uroskie recovers expanded cinema as a privileged object of art and art history, for a redefinition of medium, not an ontology of cinema but a cinematic situation. However, this project of art historical recovery entails in part passing over the contemporaneous claims of the professed champions of expanded cinema, such as Youngblood or the highly-influential Marshall McLuhan, especially at their most exuberantly, ravingly countercultural. Youngblood’s claims for “expanded cinema as expanded consciousness” would be accompanied by his announcement for the advent of the Paleocybernetic Age— not a Post-Industrial Age but a short-circuiting of “the primitive potential” of the
Paleolithic with the techno-utopianism of the Cybernetic, a new age whose present-day prophet would be “a hairy, buckskinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms”: “it’s the dawn of man: for the first time in history we’ll soon be free enough to discover who we are.”39 Technology freed from the needs of human nature, it now fulfills and extends one’s dreams and desires, expanding one’s communicative capacities “beyond his most extravagant visions.”40 The prophet here embodies Stewart Brand’s New Communalist ideal of “transcendental planning”; as Fred
Turner would put it, “he is an Indian; he is also an engineer.”
39 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 41.
40 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 41.
162 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 As I will argue, in Tom Sherman’s work, expanded cinema is an object of inquiry precisely at the level of its most exuberantly, ravingly countercultural. The question is neither what nor where is cinema, but how and why do a certain group of people at this time claim that cinema is everywhere—especially inside one’s head, muscles, veins, functioning as “nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.”
For Sherman, the question is not of the institutional and discursive space between the black box and the white cube, but rather the white cube as a black box—or rather a
“closed world.” As Paul Edwards describes of the Cold War world view, “it is a world radically divided against itself. Turned inexorably inward, without frontiers or escape, a closed world threatens to annihilate itself, to implode.”41 In Sherman’s work, the closed world is worked through on the terms of the mind, the threat of its implosion, its annihilation. Of assistance here is a crucial, if under-considered aspect in the work of
Marshall McLuhan. In Understanding Media, McLuhan proposes an ambivalent description of media drawn from the “closed system” of the Narcissus myth.42 Narcissus,
McLuhan reminds us, derives from the Greek word narcosis or numbness. Narcissus has not so much fallen in love as he has been rendered numb, deprived of the power of sensation: “This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.”43 McLuhan describes the development of new technological extensions necessarily involves a corresponding
41 Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 12.
42 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 41.
43 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41.
163 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 process of auto-amputation, suggesting a zero-sum game: any new advance of sensory expansion is accompanied by a corresponding narcosis. “Amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception.”44 McLuhan continues, “The young man’s image is a self-amputation or extension produced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.”45 We find this dialectical notion of media—more like a phantom limb than expanded consciousness— hyperbolized in Sherman’s work.
In April 1971, on the second floor hallway of Sill Hall, on the campus of Eastern
Michigan University, Sherman induced himself to black-out for the second time by means of hyperventilation. This performance is a second iteration of the Hyperventilation performance of 1970, a recontextualization of the hyperventilation action as an aggressive behavioral intervention blocking students and faculty from commencing regular afternoon studio classes in drawing, painting, and printmaking. A photograph from the event appears exposed to register the electronic image on a television monitor in near-distance as well as the surrounding space of the hallway. The hallway itself is lit by a kind of low-grade television glow by institutional fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling. At center-right in the image, the video monitor rests on a podium in the hallway, leaning against a wall of lockers. The video monitor is the darkest element in the exposure, a black frame around the illuminated screen. On the screen we see the midsection of
44 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 43.
45 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 43.
164 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Sherman, from belly to middle thigh, his hands curled like parentheses around the dash of his belt. In the photograph we see three figures in all, dispersed down the hallway. Their positions suggest a pedagogical arrangement, as if they were in a didactic illustration of perspectival space. The nearest stands with his back to us; he is John Orentlicher, a professor in the EMU Art Department. Orentlicher attends a wheeled tripod topped with a video camera, its black cable leading towards and then up the podium to the monitor in a rough hundred-degree angle to the left wall base, making a kind of quadrangle frame for the central action. In near-silhouette, he directs the camera down the hallway, towards the central figure, barely visible. The man is Sherman, his face obscured by black hair like a hood. His shoulders are poised, tense. His feet are set together in a pose of unnatural rigidity imposed on his entire body. Wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt and dark pants, he nearly disappears in the stark tonality of the concrete walls and the burnished wax rivulets of the floor, as if he were a part of the furniture, if not for the bound aggression of his posture. One recognizes that the figure in middle-distance is the same appearing simultaneously on the video monitor, the monitor giving a more clear if partial view to his taut stance set in readiness with his fingers pointed, cupped for a thrust, not a parry.
They are claws for a somnambulist. Cesare stands in this hallway, awaiting Dr. Caligari’s directive.
The third figure stands in far-distance, at the end of the hallway. The figure is indiscernible, a dark form in stark contrast to the bright light emanating form the window just behind. The window rhymes with the screen of the closed-circuit video monitor, two screens at the center of this image, twin frames directed by crisp orthogonals of the
165 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 building. Further down the hallway, pointed toward that third figure, stands a second monitor transmitting the live feed from Orentlicher’s camera, to another television, obscured in our present view in the photograph. The live video feed from the camera operated by Orentlicher, split by coaxial cable to drive the two monitors, provides frontal detail of the progressive distressing effects of the hyperventilation, while the monitors form a mediated barrier of the performance. Thus, a closed circuit was made, with
Sherman in the middle as its target, at the center of this shooting gallery. Yet it was his audience that was trapped, blocked from passage in the hallway, confronted with his mannered, at-will extreme and total physical taxation, while Orentlicher counted out the performance’s duration at one minute intervals. Sherman lasted late into the sixth minute.
“The idea was to ‘block’ the hall with this performance just as the students were heading to their various studio classes on this floor,” Sherman reflected recently. “A considerable audience built up during the seven minutes of the action, and this audience was maximized by conducting the performance just before afternoon studio classes began.”46
Will he take a breath, will he step forward, release the tension? But perhaps the opposite would be the case. Perhaps if that distance closed, we would stop breathing ourselves.
Here we find the manifest erotic, even auto-erotic, character of Hyperventilation, its explicit parallel with sexual exertion and orgasm—a parallel that often eclipses to a contagious affect among its audiences, heavy breathing to heaving to laughter, exhalation, rippling among the viewers. As Sherman’s autonomic system closes, slams down upon
46 Tom Sherman, email communication to the author, February 3, 2013.
166 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 itself, we find our libidinal currents momentarily engineered by Sherman’s influencing machine.
Hyperventilation, as it was conducted at EMU in this second iteration, presents a working through of the instantaneous closed circuit transmission capability distinctive to the video instrument on terms of psychophysical relation. Sherman subjects himself to an
“ascending method of limits,” admitting and expelling gases from his lungs in great heaves. His muscles tire, spasms wrack his frame, fatigue gives him up to gravity. Here the system of video, and the cybernetics shorthand of “feedback,” which have provided such a neat discursive analogy, are hyperbolized as an existential foreclosure, a penetrating regression, contingent to the pressures of environmental conditions. One finds in Sherman’s ordeal not only a snare into complicity but affective transference, induction into this heaving circuit. Indeed, the Hyperventilation performance with video relay suggests that the human-machine relationship may not simply be articulated through the circuit of input and output, but rather the bellows of a lung. Further, the white expanse of
Sherman’s ganzfeld experiment, the absence of external visual stimulus, seems to have a darker valence, literally a black out partner: a nightmarish loss of consciousness. The projects seem not so much devoted to insight, but a struggle to manage information.
Perhaps, Sherman asks in these works, by instigating errant directives to the mechanisms of regulation and relation—mind and closed circuit video—one might make room for new signals in the network.
In “Psychic Television,” Stefan Andriopoulos posits that television as a device sought by engineers was coextensive with television as a psychic process from
167 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 television’s inception in the late 19th Century. Andriopoulos delineates a history of the televisual imaginary coextensive with spiritualist discourses of the mind as medium. By considering Andriopoulos’s argument, we can situate Sherman’s second iteration of the hyperventilation performance in a broader historical context of media as process of mind control. Andriopoulos writes:
“The slow accumulation of technical and physical knowledge, beginning around 1890, accelerating in the 1920s, and enabling the first wireless transmissions of moving pictures in the last years of that decade did not take place in a vacuum that could be separated from its contingent cultural contexts. Instead, occultist studies on psychic “clairvoyance” (Hellsehen) and “television” (Fernsehen), carried out in the same period by spiritualists who emulated the rules and procedures of science, played a constitutive role for the technological inventions and developments of electrical television. … While spiritualism serves as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the invention of electrical television, the emerging technology simultaneously fulfills the very same function for spiritualist research on psychic telesight.”47
In a sense, television has always strived to both meet and exceed its technical burdens. As electrical television proceeded to the wireless transmission of moving images, spiritualists functioned in a reciprocal capacity, adopting the conceits of scientific culture while bolstering the technological developments with their imagination of psychic telesight. Psychic and technical television, Andriopoulos concludes, “render each other imaginable.”48 “The archaeology of the medium therefore testifies to a reciprocal
47 Stefan Andriopoulos, “Psychic Television,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 622-623.
48 Andriopoulos, “Psychic Television,” 637.
168 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 interaction between the emergence of a new technology and surrounding cultural discourses,” Andriopoulos writes.
We can situate the notion of the influencing machine, and Sherman’s construction of influencing machines in particular, in this genealogy of psychic and technical television. It originates in the eighteenth century with the British inventor Francis
Hauksbee and his Influence Machine, and the subsequent use of the term by the Austrian psychoanalyst Victor Tausk in his famous essay of 1919, “On the Origins of the
‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia.” Hauksbee’s device consisted of a glass globe nine inches in diameter containing mercury and evacuated of air. He would spin the globe by means of a crank mechanism. When spun, the globe emitted light from the mercury pressed into motion across its interior surface. “I have found the Light produced to be so great, that a large Print might without much difficulty be read by it,” wrote the student of
Sir Isaac Newton. “And at the same time, the Room, which was large and wide, became sensibly enlightened, and the Wall was visible at the remotest distance, which was at least ten Foot.”49 When applying his hand in “a very slender Touch” to the exterior of the globe, his other rapidly working the “great Wheel” of the drive mechanism, the electricity adhered to his point of contact. When he readmitted air into the glass globe, “the Light began to branch off into pleasant Figures, from the side of the Globe touch’d by the
Hand.”50 Hauksbee had produced a momentary increase in energy fluence, “the quantity
49 Francis Hauksbee, “An Experiment concerning the Production of a considerable Light, upon a slight Attrition of a Glass Globe exhausted of its Air,” Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects. Containing an Account of Several Surprising Phenomena touching Light and Electricity, producible on the Attrition of Bodies. With many other Remarkable Appearances, not before observ’d, Second Edition (London, 1709), 46.
50 Hauksbee, “An Experiment,” 48.
169 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 of energy per unit area,” also known as the concentration of radiant exposure.51 Tausk, for his part, called upon the term in his diagnosis of schizophrenics who believed themselves the recipients of messages from remote sources. The psychoanalyst employed Hauksbee’s electric relation of person and machine, the influence between the two bodies, to describe the vivid persecutions experienced by his patients:
“The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of the machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.”52
Tausk’s essay has proved especially compelling for his description of the device as a magic lantern or cinematograph that generates two-dimensional moving images and thoughts and feelings “by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the
51 Oxford English Dictionary, fluence, n. (1607); French fluence; Latin fluentia, fluentem.
52 Victor Tausk, “On the Origins of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” (1919), trans. Dorian Feigenbaum, in Victor Tausk, Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers, ed. Paul Roazen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 186.
170 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain.”53 The psychoanalyst observes that the Influencing Machine is a product of psychic projection of the libido in an attempt to resolve a subject’s inability to differentiate between interior and exterior experience in the absence of definitive causality for their psycho-somatic traumas. Malicious control is attributed to an outer, remote enemy that is in fact the victim’s own body, estranged from itself. Haunted by a narcissism that has subsumed their ego, Tausk’s patients look outward for a machine that resembles themselves. Caught between projective hallucinations and self-annihilation, Tausk’s patients seem incapable of reconciling the libidinal impulses of their bodies.
Recall Sherman’s second iteration of Hyperventilation at Eastern Michigan
University, on the second floor of Sill Hall, at the target-point of a live closed-circuit video frame and a twinned arrangement of video monitors defining the disruptive performance in the center of the hallway as a mediated blockade. The performance not only accentuates the bodily trauma of Sherman’s action, but the trauma of mediation itself. As Sherman heaves, his frame wracked with spasms, spittle from his gaping mouth drawing lines to the floor, his hands curling into hard claws, one is reminded of
McLuhan’s notion of media as necessarily coextensive with an auto-amputation of the ostensibly amplified sense. However, in this acute case, Sherman’s whole body is
53 Tausk, “‘Influencing Machine,’” 187. A recent example of Tausk’s currency would be the 2012 exhibition Ghosts in the Machine at the New Museum, New York, in which his essay is cited as a prominent contribution to the historical convergence of psychology, technology, and art. See Ghosts in the Machine, catalog to the exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Garry Carrion-Murayari (New York: Skira Rizzoli and New Museum, 2012). For an analysis of Tausk’s implications for film theory, see the important review-essay by Joan Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine,” October 23 (Winter 1982): 43-59.
171 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 numbed to black-out, his whole organism becomes a phantom limb. “He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.”54
In 1976, Rosalind Krauss published her canonical essay “Video: The Aesthetics of
Narcissism.” Krauss argued that narcissism is a defining characteristic of video art, even suggesting that the psychological situation of narcissism is itself the actual medium of video. The article is distinguished by a deep ambivalence towards the status of video as a medium. Indeed, for Krauss, video is a nugatory assemblage of irredeemable commercial devices pitched against the estimable rigor of advanced painting and sculpture. Krauss suggests that artists’ use of video is not so much one of self-expression as the amplification of narcissistic impulses, a cold, mealy loop in which the Other is bracketed out for withdrawal into the Self: video pulls one’s attention from the physical world into an echo chamber of solipsism. In addition to narcissism, Krauss describes this situation with the phrase “absolute feedback”:
“One could say that if the reflexiveness of modernist art is a dédoublement or doubling back in order to locate the object (and thus the objective conditions of one’s experience), the mirror-reflection of absolute feedback is a process of bracketing out the object. This is why it seems inappropriate to speak of a physical medium in relation to video. For the object (the electronic equipment and its capabilities) has become merely an appurtenance. And instead, video’s real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object—an Other—and invest it in the Self. Therefore, it is not just any psychological condition one is speaking of. Rather it is the condition of someone who has in Freud’s words, ‘abandoned the investment of
54 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41.
172 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 objects with libido and transformed object-libido into ego-libido.’ And that is the specific condition of narcissism.”55
The term “absolute feedback” leaps forward. Indeed, video presents a literal feedback system: its ontological status is defined by light passing from a camera that translates that light into an electronic signal, which is then passed to a monitor that translates the signal back into a representational image coincident with that captured by the camera. Krauss, in this early account, dismisses video by interpreting its absolute feedback within the terms of narcissism. However, as the historical record has shown, especially as it pertains to video, electronic imaging technology may not be so quickly derided as a “mere appurtenance.” In the case of Sherman’s work, we see that video may not simply be elided with “a psychological situation” in which one “withdraws attention from an external object—an Other.” Rather, we find a dialectical suspension between amputation and extension, a “dead hand” extending a condition of the whole body. Recall
McLuhan: “Amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception.” Not Narcissus falling in love with his own image, rather the recognition that he is distinct from his environment. Thus, we encounter not an aesthetics of narcissism, not a reductive play of representations, but rather a concern with the Self turning into Other: a distinctively Cold War anxiety of infiltration. In this way, Krauss’s own term “absolute feedback” provides a cogent means by which to describe the
55 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 57. For another perspective on Krauss’s application of narcissism within contexts of video experimentation contemporaneous to those considered by Krauss, see David Joselit, “Tale of the Tape: Radical Software,” Artforum (May 2002); and David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), chapter 3.
173 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 technical-libidinal modalities at work in Hyperventilation. As we shall see, Sherman would subsequently build rooms by which to examine that closed system.
5. Panic Rooms
In November 1972, Sherman built an orgone energy accumulator at A Space, the artist- run center in Toronto. He installed the accumulator in a storage space behind the gallery.
The accumulator remained there for years, a kind of extraordinary closet within a closet, actively used by many in the A Space community and the generally curious in Toronto.
“My orgone box looked like a cross between a gas chamber and a confessional,” Sherman reflected. It “was an imposing object to look at, but you had to sit in it, in the cold, metallic darkness, to get the full effect.”56
The accumulator was first conceived by the Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich in
1940. The accumulator was designed and manufactured as a simple cubic structure of varying dimensions, usually sized to fit one person, and constituted by alternating layers of commonly available insulating and conductive construction materials—plywood, insulation, steel wool—in alternating layers. Its interior was lined with sheet metal. The accumulator is a part-instrument part-monument, a kind of agitated monolith, compelling for its simplicity and for the theoretical ambitions with which Reich imbued it. While the object lacked conventional elements of technological sophistication—without moving parts, electrical components, and neither airtight nor light-safe, its door held by any available conventional latch—Reich asserted that the configuration of materials held
56 Tom Sherman, The Faraday Cage (self-published manuscript, 2006, revised 2014), 54-55.
174 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 intense energetic properties. He believed that orgone energy, accumulated in his instrument, would instigate intense recuperative potentiality for whomever may choose to enter. Such a person increases the circulation of his or her own naturally produced bioelectrical radiation and is simultaneously immersed in a concentration of atmospheric radiation that is attracted by the materials of the accumulator. The orgone in the body of the participating subject is in dynamic exchange with that of the accumulator and their shared environment. For Reich, his instrument was a self-sufficient system of transformation. He determined that orgone is “capable of developing a motor force.”57
Thus, Reich believed that he, by means of the accumulator, had summarily invalidated the Second Law of Thermodynamics.58
A constant higher temperature, slower electroscopic discharge, and higher rate of electrical impulses in the accumulator proffered adequate registration of orgone’s presence. Orgone may be defined as static electricity, but for Reich it was an omnipresent force of cosmic proportions. Mass-free and pre-atomic, orgone is the “concretely demonstrable, usable, and measurable” substance of life itself.59 In effect, he sought to find the physiological source of Freud’s notion of the libido, to transform it into a material substance. Reich pursued a definition of sexual drive not as a metaphor, but as quantifiable matter. It is the natural pulsation at the foundation of his bio-psychiatry.
Reich’s cube form, he claimed, could shield the individual from the harm of nuclear
57 Wilhelm Reich, Discovery of the Orgone, Volume Two: The Cancer Biopathy (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1948), 150.
58 Reich, The Cancer Biopathy, 106.
59 Wilhelm Reich, The Orgone Energy Accumulator: Its Scientific and Medical Use (Rangeley, Maine: Orgone Institute, 1951), 13.
175 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 radiation through imbuing him or her with lasting concentrations of orgone energy. This energy would continue to protect the subject after they exited the accumulator. Imminent devastation by nuclear war may be staved off, Reich believed, by engaging with this natural, “body-own” life force within the refuge of the accumulator.60 His “life rays” of cosmic orgone energy could, he suspected, counter the “death rays” of nuclear radiation.61 Pursuant of this ameliorative potential, Reich freely distributed the blueprints for his design.
The accumulator emerged as a materialization of Reich’s efforts to merge
Freudian analysis and Marxist political science. By means of the accumulator, there is no privileged relation of analyst to analysand. All living organisms participate equally as anti-entropic micro-systems in a continuum of struggle for biological and class- consciousness, a polyvalent “functional unity.”62 For Reich, there was no separation between perceiving subject and perceived subject, between individual and atmospheric phenomena, between individual and culture. The orgone energy accumulator was Reich’s initial contribution to an acknowledgement of and engagement with the global network of bioelectric exchange.In the 1920s, when Reich began his studies as a prized pupil of
Freud in Vienna, this merger took the form of free health clinics for factory workers in
Austria. Reich and his colleagues provided medical assistance and psychiatric services to thousands of workers, men and women. To the discomfort of his colleagues in the
60 Reich, The Cancer Biopathy, 274.
61 Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 281.
62 Reich, The Cancer Biopathy, 84.
176 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 psychoanalytic and Marxist communities, he made his claims unequivocal: “Because psychoanalysis, unless it is watered down, undermines bourgeois ideology, and because, furthermore, only a socialist economy can provide a basis for the free development of intellect and sexuality alike, psychoanalysis has a future only under socialism.”63 Despite his initial prodigal status, Reich would be subsequently ejected from the Austrian
Psychoanalytic Association and the Austrian Communist Party.
His work disavowed by his colleagues, and following pressure from the National-
Socialists, Reich was forced from Vienna and then from Berlin, found temporary support in Norway but was again under threat, and departed on the last steamship bound for the
United States. He continued to publish, formulating his theories in books such as The
Function of the Orgasm (1927), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual
Revolution (1936). In 1940, following initial support through the New School for Social
Research in New York, where he taught classes on sex economy, Reich settled in
Rangeley, Maine, where he founded the research center Orgonon, now the Wilhelm Reich
Museum. Reich closed his book The Cancer Biopathy with a challenge to disprove the possible recuperative affects of the accumulator by introducing accumulators to
5,000-10,000 subjects and documenting their rates of cancer development over a period of 3-5 years. Reich believed that such wide-scale use of the accumulator would vindicate his initial findings that the concentrated orgone energy found in the device would assist in the prevention of somatic ailments. “This plan may seem phantastic to many a reader. But if it is possible to mobilize whole populations of a planet for war purposes, it certainly
63 Reich, “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis,” 56.
177 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 should be possible to mobilize a district with 10,000 inhabitants for the purpose of a decisive experiment.”64 However, the accumulator stood as the central grievance in investigation by the Food and Drug Administration. Under the accusation of producing fraudulent remedies in the object of the accumulator, the FDA began a program of persecution symptomatic of early Cold War communist paranoia. Orgone is a term for an idiosyncratic belief in the revolutionary power of merging psychoanalysis and socialism; that this merger took form most intensely in sexual excitation spelled the terms of the
FDA’s anxiety. In 1956, the FDA ordered the incineration of all books pertaining to
Reich’s orgone energy accumulator—nearly all his writings. The FDA also ordered the destruction of all accumulators. Reich died in 1957 in a federal penitentiary awaiting appeal.
By the 1960s, however, Reich’s books were circulating widely in reprint. In 1964,
Time Magazine featured Reich in its cover story on “The Second Sexual Revolution.”
There were hundreds of accumulators at the height of Reich’s teachings in the United
States, and the accumulator was advocated by prominent figures of the counterculture such as William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux of
New York republished new translations of his texts. The Sexual Revolution, foundational to the counterculture, was in its seventh printing by 1971.65 Reich’s acolytes, today a shrinking and increasingly isolated population centered around the Wilhelm Reich
Museum in Maine, sought scientific legitimacy for his work. However, the accumulator
64 Reich, The Cancer Biopathy, 368.
65 Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Towards a Self-Governing Character Structure, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971).
178 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 has been more potent as a thought-figure, a discursive provocation. The historically controversial character of his claims, imbued with the seriousness of their basis in psychoanalytic and Marxist rhetoric, underscored by the tragic circumstances of his persecution and death, proved an alluring mixture, turning Reich into a kind of quixotic patron saint of vernacular liberalism. “It sometimes seems that all America is one big
Orgone Box,” Time Magazine observed.66
Sherman’s construction of an accumulator indicates the avid reception of Reich’s work in the Canadian/American counterculture. However, Sherman’s accumulator materializes his own particular engagement with control societies that exceeds the popular circulation of Reich’s thought as an advocate for free and open sexuality. In
Sherman’s case we find the accumulator as metaphor for control—and lack of control— of larger determining forces. Where in Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as
“control and communication in the animal and machine,” the “communication” component has been the subject of extensive scrutiny, “control” has been left wanting of examination in its implications, especially in the context of the take-up of cybernetics in its popular form. Working through those implications through the use of a device invented by one of the most prominent figures of the counterculture, Sherman’s accumulator not only is a symptom of counterculture devotion to sexual revolution but it is also a formulation of the anxieties of communication, the compulsions to define the terms of communication, and the forces applied to the energetics of thought. From the poignancy of Reich’s wish to ameliorate the pain of World War, compounded by repeated
66 “The Second Sexual Revolution,” Time Magazine, 22 January 1964.
179 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 institutional isolation that precipitated his imprisonment and death, we find Sherman constructing the accumulator not only as a curious structure of scientistic discourse, but also as a site of refuge in an increasingly determined information environment.
The accumulator was not the only device Sherman produced in this effort. On
May 16, 1973, Sherman presented his Faraday Cage at A Space. The structure was invented in 1836 by the British physicist Michael Faraday. Faraday designed his cage for the purpose of conducting sensitive electromagnetic experiments that were otherwise disturbed by ambient electric forces. A Faraday cage shields its interior by taking electric charges to ground. For Sherman, the Faraday cage was a means of separation from the increasingly intense electronic field of Toronto. His cage was “a six-foot square cube of negative, radio-free space, in the middle of downtown Toronto, a major city with scores of radio and television stations and microwave transmitters, and an electrical grid pumping an electromagnetic smog of radio frequency energy through every building and lung and every cubic centimeter of Toronto’s air.”67 And the cage was also a minimalist sculpture in dynamic synthesis with discourses of art history, communication, and Cold
War cultural ideology, the so-called cultures of containment. “My interests and experiments differed from Faraday’s,” Sherman explained. “My ‘cage’ asked the visitors to A Space’s gallery to contemplate the invisible, electromagnetic forces bombarding their bodies … and offered them a chance to find refuge in the radio-free space of my cage.” 68
67 Sherman, The Faraday Cage, 2.
68 Sherman, The Faraday Cage, 2.
180 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 One device originally conceived to gather and intensify energy and the other to shield from it, in A Space they became two shelters against cultural fall-out, two panic rooms reconstructed out of their initial historical context for management of social ecology. For Sherman, the accumulator and the cage were two products of a compulsion to engage a larger environment of psychophysical relations. Each materializes a strategy to frame out, in media-architectural terms, not only a space but a lived condition.
Sherman’s Faraday Cage “brought to mind the invisible reality of the intense electromagnetic radiation normally present in the city, and it created the opportunity to find temporary shelter in the cage within the gallery.”69 Whereas mind control offered a vulgar definition of ideology, the accumulator and cage offered “perimeter defense” at the level of interpersonal sociality, and psychophysical relation to environment. The
“invisible reality,” as we have seen, may be as much electromagnetic forces as ideological threat. For Sherman, the “noise” of the apparatuses post-industrial life was coextensive with the material force of social influence. The accumulator and the cage, charged with history, reimagined as civil defense shelters against the radiation of psychophysical determination. And, like the dynamic exchange between the perceiving and perceived subject sought by Reich, the accumulator and the cage may be seen to agitate in a broader, expanded field of aesthetic experimentation, works of sculpture as much as objects imbued with scientistic properties. “Nothing, it would seem, could possibly give this object the right to lay claim to whatever one might mean by the
69 Sherman, The Faraday Cage, 2-3.
181 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 category sculpture. Unless, that is, the category can be made to become almost infinitely malleable.”70
As suggested in Rosalind Krauss’s opening provocation in her essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” the notion of sculpture was under intensive pressure in the 1970s by the kind of material and discursive promiscuity evinced in Sherman’s work. Whereas
Krauss would assert the need to “logically” map the coordinates of these developments by means adopted from structural anthropology, we find in Sherman’s reconstruction of the orgone energy accumulator and the Faraday cage an aspiration ill-fit to discourses of medium specificity, but well placed within a cultural history of mind control. If the accumulator and the cage evoke comparison to Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube
(1963-65), they also require equal consideration among a larger constellation of postwar experiments in behavior modification technologies such as John Lilly’s sensory deprivation tank or B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning chamber. In this context, John
Cage’s legendary encounter with an anechoic chamber at Harvard University comes to appear not only as a primal scene for his theories on silence and noise, but, in addition, a crucial moment in a longer history of cultures of control. We may productively consider
Sherman’s work, then, as a kind of “missed encounter” between Haacke’s systems work exemplified by Condensation Cube, and the performances of self-harm by Chris Burden, such as Velvet Water of 1974., a reframing of institutional critique and performance art by situating Sherman’s work within the discursive poles of their gravitational pull.
70 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30.
182 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Haacke’s Condensation Cube is comprised of a hermetically sealed plexiglas cube of thirty centimeters containing one centimeter of water. Condensation is generated in the object contingent to the environmental circumstances in which it is exhibited. In this way, the work materializes the dynamic relation between the conditions of interior and exterior space, especially those environmental conditions as they are determined by the gallery or museum and their particular specification of climate control for the exhibition.. But also, the activation of condensation in the cube would be determined by the thermodynamic variable of its audience. Condensation Cube enacts the institutional need for constancy in the interest of preservation of work while displaying the fragile character of that constancy when it is subjected to the ostensible purpose of that institution, of that work, namely display to an audience. Condensation Cube belies the constitutive conflict in the institution, presenting in its own material base the vagaries of ecological forces subjected to corporate self-interest. In this way, Condensation Cube anticipates Haacke’s later work
MoMA-Poll of 1970, in which constancy is explicitly represented as social constancy and status quo. Thus, we find an inversion of Richard Aldcroft’s preoccupation with the effects of weather on his geodesic spheres. Where Aldcroft disavowed the social for the natural, in Haacke’s work we find the natural is a materialization, a physicalization, of social determination.
Burden’s Velvet Water offers a complementary view. Less well-known than Shoot
(1971) or Trans-Fixed (1974), Velvet Water involved an audience invited into a room at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The audience faced a stage on which five video monitors stood on a pole, one nineteen inches, and two more of smaller dimensions on
183 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 each side of the central monitor. They all presented the same live feed to a utility closet separated directly off the stage. Burden entered the adjacent room, his image transmitted in extreme close-up on the five monitors, his head tightly framed over a tub filled with water. Burden announced, “Today I am going to breathe water, which is the opposite of drowning, because when you breathe water, you believe water to be richer, thicker oxygen capable of sustaining life.” He then proceeded to push his head under the water’s surface. His body instinctively rejected the action, throwing his neck and back out of the water. Burden probed the involuntary, autonomic responses of the body in a similar way as Sherman pushed the limits of his body in Hyperventilation. Burden’s soaked head and gasps were broadcast into the auditorium, the coincidence of reception and broadcast unique to video technology—its “live” capability—turned into a circuit of culpability,
“instantaneous feedback” materialized into the short temporal-spatial distance between the viewers and the drowning man, daring them to look away, to stop his plunges. As
Robert Horvitz observed, “The electronic link between him and the audience tacitly implicated them in this ordeal, even as it seemed to distance them sensually.”71 Burden’s breathing became labored, ragged. His whole body shudders, spasms; his determined submersion into the sink becomes more labored too, and each time he attempts to inhale, his neck is slower to pull him to safety. Yet he forced his head, again and again, into the water. The tight framing on his head on the small monitors, the limited detail of the black and white image, and the redundancy of his image across the monitors, a repetition into
71 Robert Horvitz, “Chris Burden,” Artforum, May 1976, 24-31.
184 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 abstraction, suggests Burden was throwing his head not only into water but into the depths of the television itself. Burden collapsed after five minutes.
Recall Sherman’s second iteration of Hyperventilation three years earlier, in 1971.
In that version, Sherman hyperventilated while it was captured by a video camera and then split into video displays on two monitors, pointed in opposite directions toward either end of the second floor hallway in Sill Hall. The ostensible “redundancy” of the actual and mediated events underscores the crucial shift between the body of the performer and the electronic environment he arranges, asserting the process of mediation itself as the site of the work. The display and use of a tripod-mounted camera, video monitors on podiums, Orentlicher calling out the duration of the action by the minute— these details code Sherman’s action not as a spontaneous accident, not as the victim of a tragic seizure, but rather the producer of a deliberate act of self-sabotage for the mediating technology. Indeed, the “redundancy” carries the concomitant point that the arrangement of machines may be the inducing force for his measured hysteric attack. In
Sherman’s second presentation of Hyperventilation, transmission itself is the work—and the hazard. Sherman in Hyperventilation, Burden in Velvet Water, Sherman in the ganzfeld action published on the cover of Video By Artists in 1976: a series of macabre highs, desperate striving for a purity—of oxygen, of light, of mind—close viciously on themselves, under their conditions of social relation, what Sherman will later diagnose under his term “cultural engineering.”72
In 1971, Jack Burnham famously declared:
72 Tom Sherman, Cultural Engineering, ed. Willard Holmes, exhibition catalogue (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1980).
185 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “‘Live in your head’ means that the printed page is to Conceptualism what the picture plane is to illusionistic Realism: an unavoidable belaboring of the point, inelegant communication. Printed proposals are make-do art; Conceptual art’s ideal medium is telepathy. Analogously, at the present time conversational computer programs function through typewriter terminals; eventually computer communication will be verbal or direct neural relay.”73
Sherman presents the underside of this psychic dimension, the inverse of the desire for “direct neural relay.” Through his work we find that the ideal medium is not so much telepathy but mind control. Increasingly complex systems of communication and control proliferated in the Cold War period. In the form of structures of administrative power and instruments of war, those systems seemed to churn alarmingly beyond any relation to the will of their supposed constituents. Sherman strived to develop methods to renegotiate the modes of personal agency apparently delineated for them by these instruments. Sherman built devices and systems that might redirect the dynamic forces of his culture, however fraught, however momentary.
6. The Art-Style Computer Processing System
In 1974, Sherman published a short essay entitled “The Art-Style Computer-Processing
System.” The Art-Style Computer-Processing System is a machine of sorts, an image processor for understanding and expanding the range and relevance of painting—an influencing machine in the particular discursive context of conceptual art. The artist presents a hilarious, nuanced critique of increasing reliance on computer technologies.
73 Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (February 1970): 37.
186 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Specifically, Sherman considers the effect of computers upon art historiography. The
“ASCPS” essay is, more broadly, an example of the artist’s meditation on image/text relationships and their effect on individual expression in an environment increasingly bound to computer technologies. In a droll, banal, matter of fact voice—“the colorless voice of a technical writer, or an academic writing communications theory” in Sherman’s reflection74—the artist describes a hypothetical processing system that is
“specifically designed to manipulate the message transmitted to the two- dimensional surface of the video screen. The message is limited to display on the flat surface of the video screen. An analogy is formed between processing the video message and the act of painting. This processing system provides personal choice of how the message source is viewed, in the same way the painter chooses to view the environment through his or her methods or style of painting. This system is labeled the ASCPS.”75
Terms such as “specifically” and “personal choice” flag the barely implicit criticism of the transceivers that the article ostensibly celebrates. The “analogy” of the processing system comes to suggest not only the electronics of video and television, but also the historical tradition of painting. The “Art-Style Computer-Processing System” refers to the fraught rhetorical devices carried by communication technologies. The artist elaborates in machinic, almost pathological, detail:
74 Tom Sherman, email communication to the author, 15 May 2015.
75 Tom Sherman, “The Art-Style Computer-Processing System” (1974), in Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, ed. Peggy Gale (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2002), 173. Originally published in Journal for the Communication of Advanced Television Studies (London, England) vol. 2 no. 2 (Fall, 1974).
187 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 “The ASCPS is constructed of information obtained from every major historically innovative treatment of the two-dimensional surface. The system contains the concise history of painting. By block encoding historically successful modes of sensing, the system contains a set of period visions. These period visions are methods of seeing the environment. They are rule-governed styles for processing messages. The rules are those instituted by schools of painting dominating particular periods of history. At this time, period visions contained by the system are: Abstract Expressionism, Abstract Impressionism, Action Painting, Arabesque, Art Nouveau, Automatism, Barbizon School, Baroque, Bio-Morphic, Cartoon, Classic, Colour-Field, Cubism, Dada, Danube School Divisionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Gothic (Late and International), Group of Seven, History Painting, Hudson River School, Impressionism, London Group, Mannerism, Neo-Classic, Neo-Impressionism, Optical, Orphic Cubism, Painterly Abstraction, Photo-Realism, Pointillism, Post- Impressionism, Primitive, Rayonism, Realism, Renaissance, Rococo, Romanist, Romantic, Social Realism, Super-Realism, Suprematism, Surrealism, Synthetism, Tenebrism, and Vorticism.”76
Sherman’s essay is a joke on the rhetorics of Art History through a speculative text describing something like the famed Paik/Abe video synthesizer built by Nam June
Paik and Shuya Abe in 1969 for the public television station WGBH-TV in Boston. He is in dialogue with contemporaneous concerns over the exhaustion of modernism, the reduction of the strategies of the avant-garde to repeatable templates, to noxious genres.
Sherman’s essay claims the dry, dead-pan humor of early video’s “boring” stream of muddled black and white images as an effective means to deflate the history of art into a system of “period visions.” Video processing has the last laugh as the structure and vehicle for Art History, now the content and style of telecommunications hardware. Like the cybernetic discourse so influential upon Sherman while he wrote his essay, the
76 Sherman, “The Art-Style Computer-Processing System,” 173-74.
188 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ASCPS as a hypothetical influencing machine is an aggregate of disciplinary codes. An essay by an artist deeply immersed in the information environment, one sees an individual striving to manage that environment. Sherman gives us his own ambivalent
“period vision” of telecommunications technologies, its predetermined channels that offer the veneer of personal agency, a historically contingent concern with the Self turning into
Other: a Cold War anxiety of infiltration.
As with Carolee Schneemann, useful context for Sherman may be found in
Experiments in Art and Technology. Consider, for example, Billy Klüver’s aspirations for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. Klüver, originally a Bell Labs engineer, became increasingly involved in the production of arts-related initiatives for corporations and governmental institutions. The Pepsi Pavilion was one of his largest undertakings through EAT, and its fraught production is revealing. Exorbitantly expensive and with little aesthetic result to show for the efforts, the EAT associates were summarily dismissed by the Pepsi Corporation soon after the Pavilion was unveiled in Osaka. Klüver had hoped that, “As a work of art, the Pavilion and its operation would be an open-ended situation, an experiment in the scientific sense of the word.” Here we see Klüver understanding his bureaucratic efforts in themselves as a work of art, a kind of artist as manager. Yet, within the frame of the bureaucracy he built, there was a great paucity of innovation (recall La Monte Young’s contrived and literalist soundscape of “the four seasons”). Following the debacle of the Pepsi Pavilion, EAT was diminished in its capability to create programming. Klüver’s efforts were largely devoted to the production of reports and proposals for various public sector institutions. Where Klüver lost sight of
189 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 the critical potential in the opportunities he was creating, Sherman saw his role as a bureaucrat in more ambivalent, existential terms. For Sherman, the post-60s “information environment” was not defined so much by a merger of art and technology, as they were already long-interpenetrated. Rather, it was defined by recognition that the degree of determination of life by technocracy had drastically increased: computing technologies, international bureaucracy, and corporate self-interest, were compounded symptoms of a process long in gestation. One may find momentary refuge in an orgone energy accumulator or Faraday cage, but distinction between art and technocracy was a false choice contingent upon privilege, an effect of their mutual support. One may find new paths of negotiation, but the terms of innovation—discursive as well as apparatical— were determined by divisive self-interest exactly where connectivity and collaboration is hailed.
In the October 1967 issue of Artforum, David Silcox, Visual Arts Officer of the
Canada Council, contributed “A Note on the Canada Council.” It is a short article describing the history, scope, and aims of the Council. He begins with a joke, describing the coining of the term “artofficial” to “describe a new class of mandarin which is sympathetic to the needs, ways and aims of artists.” Silcox continues, “An ordinary but perhaps more highly-placed official” is called a “superficial.” Silcox finds in the joke
“a slight touch of malice, the uneasiness that still exists in the relationship between art and government, even though the concern with officialdom reveals the possibility of greater intimacy. … The ‘artofficial,’ like an osmotic screen, slides in to act as the filter for the kind of financial assistance that artist need and
190 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 to make sure also that the government fulfills, at a safe distance, its responsibility in developing a most important national resource.”77
The following year, in 1968, Artforum published Jack Burnham’s now-canonical article “Systems Esthetics” in which he describes how “art does not reside in material entities but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment.” Burnham continues, “In an advanced technological culture the most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-a-vis society.” …
“Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control.”78
On the one hand, we find the emergence of a particular national administrative infrastructure for support of the arts in Canada and the figure of the artofficial, the arts administrator. On the other hand, we find art defined as “psychic preparedness” in
Burnham’s phrase, a conceptual framework, a constellation of interconnected and interdependent forces deriving relevance from their context of operation. For both, the artist is an arbiter of form. Against these fraught, coexistent precedents that we may situate Sherman, not least for the fact that he played a central role in the administration and institutionalization of these cultural discourses. Sherman was appointed as Video
Officer in the Visual Art Section of the Canada Council in 1981, then promoted to
Founding Head of the Media Arts Section of the Council in 1983. In this way he was
77 David Silcox, “A Note on the Canada Council,” Artforum, October 1967, 43.
78 Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum, September 1968, 31.
191 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 pivotal to the administration of federal support for media arts in Canada during the 1980s. in which capacity he commanded directly or supervised an annual budget of approximately 12 million dollars. Sherman not only determined who would receive these funds and how—whether an individual artist, or an artist-run center, or local re-granting organization—but the very terms of the new category of “media art.” Sherman observed the transition from analog to digital video technologies, and strengthened and expanded the film and video grant streams with a digital, interactive initiative entitled “computer integrated media.” Sherman’s simultaneous activity in video and performance, and his work as an employee of the cultural apparatus of the Canadian state uniquely positioned him at a crucial juncture point in the international development of media arts discourses.
Sherman was something akin to what Reinhold Martin calls an institutional medium: a pervasive yet curiously invisible force, impacting its environment at the crossing of creative personal production and social administration.79 Sherman’s participation was defined by a rich critical ambivalence.
Coda. “All you need to know to live in more comfort …”
He bares his neck, a vulnerable pose, though made with assertive confidence, as if he were a bird courting his mate, the display of wires and capacitors a leaden plumage coiled around his head. His neck is covered in rough hair like iron filings in a magnetic field, its coarseness amplified by the high-contrast black and white character of the image. He is shirtless, the image cropped at his clavicle, his hands reaching in from the left and right to
79 Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Media, Architecture, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
192 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 support the His eyes are closed, his expression calm. He has inserted his head into a low- level electrostatic field created by the capacitors. It could be torture, could be pleasure.
He could be somehow intoxicated on this machine. The man is Tom Sherman in his
Breathing Apparatus, arranged for the purposes of making this photograph in 1974, and he is extracting a modest high through a machine. “This message is about the condition of your body,” reads the first line of typescript across the top of the image. “All you need to know to live in more comfort” …
“The message is about the condition of your body. All you need to know to live in more comfort.
This headgear is formed of copper wire connecting twelve capacitors Developing into a spiral tunnel of electric shield. The circuit makes inhaled air feel cool and light as you breathe. It is close to the feeling you get from smoking a menthol cigarette.”80
80 Tom Sherman, Breathing Apparatus and Text (1974), Cultural Engineering, 41.
193 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 5.
Conclusion
The screen was a sheet, lashed between two utility poles. It stood in open air, on the southwest side of the American military base at Long Binh, Republic of Vietnam. The area was a few meters from the perimeter fence and its spools of concertina razor wire.
The area was just dark enough for a movie, clear of the lights and buildings of the sprawling complex. Headlights crossed occasionally from vehicles traveling on Highway
One southwest to Saigon, or north to the air base at Biên Hòa. The projector was aimed toward the fence and the highway and its deep monsoon ditch. The soldiers relaxed around the sheet, watched absently. They cleaned their weapons on the short grass.
Across the sheet charged John Wayne in The Green Berets (1968), in Georgia-for-
Vietnam. The movie rolled out of the 16 mm projector as a pale rhyme to the site of its presentation. All the more so when illumination rounds exploded the packed, dry earth just beyond the makeshift cinema.
The tracers cut the darkness behind the sheet, the lines of light refracting in the spiral bundles of razor suspended in the space between the projection and the blasts, a kaleidoscope tumbling around fiction and threat. The illumination rounds raced out of a guard tower, sought the monsoon ditch. In the ditch was an enemy force one hundred strong—a reinforced company. They were attempting to attack the air base. The tower spotted the infiltrators and lit them up. The soldiers scrambled to reassemble their weapons under the strobe of tracers, searchlights, the projector. The simple cinema turned
194 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 into a ferocious prism, refracting yet fixed somehow, time measured in increments of too- late. A klaxon alarm sounded. Someone hit the projector—its bright beam made an easy target for return fire. John Wayne shuddered, then blinked out. A bad movie turned worse.
It was July 4, 1968—Independence Day—and in the night, “the war’s truest medium,” light was a mortal hazard.1
This dissertation has an origin in this scene, described to me by my father from his personal experience of it. As I have strived to formulate an account of avant-garde media cultures of the Cold War era, my father’s experience on that night often returned to mind. Dissonances of the period seemed to crystallize in his ordeal, at once particular to him and synecdochic, extraordinary not as a singular event but rather as a view to a general condition of violence interpenetrated by discourses of mediation—the violence of mediation itself. The Green Berets screened at other American military bases in Vietnam that summer. In The Short-Timers, Gustav Hasford’s classic novel of the Vietnam War,
Joker chortles with his fellow Marines, “This is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time.”2 Later, when the Marines enter Huế, Cowboy observes: “This ain’t real. This is just a John Wayne movie. Joker can be Paul Newman. I’ll be a horse.”3
In the time since, the most hyperbolic absurdities of the conflict have attained the status of a generalized truism contiguous with the word “Vietnam.” The historical imaginary has congealed into an amorphous, vernacular surrealism neither compelling nor informative, save for its revelation of the fantasies of those who invoke it. The
1 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1977), 41.
2 Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers (1979, New York: Bantam, 1980), 38.
3 Hasford, The Short-Timers, 98.
195 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Vietnam War becomes a screen in itself upon which one finds, in vivid stereotype, what one is looking for. The conflict is marshalled as a colloquial backdrop, an indistinct mise en scène for heroism amongst tragic, imperialist adventurism. Often forgotten is the complex circumstances of the conflict, perhaps most acutely that Kennedy and Johnson’s interventionist policies were a preferred alternative to Eisenhower’s mutually assured destruction by nuclear weapons. Yet the particularities of the social relations foundational to these events are overshadowed by preoccupation with isolated epiphenomena, with overdetermined representations detached from historical specificity.
Crucial aspects of this history have been provided by art history, film and media studies, communication, and the history of science and technology. However, their discrete disciplinary boundaries necessitate a broader view to the social conditions. An interdisciplinary, critical operation is required. C.P. Snow’s 1959 critique of the “two cultures” division between the sciences and humanities in postwar culture has served historians as an important reference to underscore that the distinction between the natural and social sciences was in fact not so wide as Snow presumed.4 Snow’s mourning of a lost common intellectual culture betrays his socio-economic position. And indeed we have seen the flourishing of a common culture, of a kind, on terms of finance capitalism and extortionist policies of class warfare that are as smooth in their instrumentalization of scientistic efficiency as they are in their alienating effects. The observation that science and art were interrelated in the Cold War period is insufficient. Certainly, this dissertation asserts that application of disciplinary divisions are symptomatic of motivated cultural
4 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
196 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 conditioning, and its case studies underscore this premise through a range of primary research. I have sought to explicate the propulsive force between apparently discrete phenomena, to excavate the deep structures of relation that is multifaceted, interpenetrating, complex.
As we have seen, undergirding Cold War defense industries and aesthetic experimentation are anxieties of control, and its loss. From the modalities of control we may more fully understand the dynamic relations across multiple sectors of formal and discursive development. My father’s experience on the night of July 4, 1968, finds its radical inverse in multimedia systems conceived by artists. As North American artists experimented with multi-sensory arrangements, incorporated television, video, and film projections under developing rhetorics of mixed-means and expanded cinema, they worked in corollary to discourses of representation evinced in Cold War defense technologies and policy. Thinking together these events may seem an incommensurable equivalence, an untenable relation between enemy combatants probing the perimeter of a military base in Vietnam and civilian artists’ experiments with multimedia presentations.
In this dissertation I have strived to examine the historical and social conditions by which such a notion would appear as an isomorphism, to explicate their shared historical- material continuum that would produce such discourses of analogy. Acute urgency suffuses the scenarios, each in its own way, and each offers a view to the “setting of limits, the exertion of pressures” that exceed definitions of given causal logic, demanding an historical notion of determination that is capacious, agile. Throughout the works discussed here, the ordering capabilities attributed to media technologies—their “onanic
197 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 analogies,” to recall the phrase of the engineer Peter Saage—are explored in their fragile contingency. Each in their own was a mortal threat, a “freakyfluky”—no less random, no less devastating—and no less subject to the limits and pressures of social determination.5
This dissertation explored that urgency, the motive forces of those anxieties, the purposes to which they were applied, so to understand those forces in their historical-material character, each in their own complexity. “His face was all painted up for night walking now like a bad hallucination,” Michael Herr describes Ocean Eyes, the third-tour Lurp, early in Dispatches. “Not like the painted faces I’d seen in San Francisco only a few weeks before, the other extreme of the same theater.”6
The object of study here, then, across the cases, was the desire for automatic control, the process of mediation itself, the exertion of control—formal, ideological, technological—on the particular terms of Cold War culture. That desire requires examination as it is concretized through a range of historical documents. It was the work of this dissertation to explicate how select artists contended with desire and its manifestations with and through military technology, national policy, and discourses of aesthetic experimentation. This is a study in the processes of automatic control, the politics of abstraction, in media cultures of the Cold War.
5 Herr, Dispatches, 35.
6 Herr, Dispatches, 6.
198 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Bibliography
Personal Interviews
Pierre Abbeloos Peggy Gale Jan Pottie Carolee Schneemann Tom Sherman Michael Snow
Archives
Experiments in Art and Technology Archive. Museum of Modern Art. New York, New York.
Carolee Schneemann. Private collection. New Paltz, New York.
Carolee Schneemann Papers, 1959-2011. Stanford University Special Collections and University Archives. Stanford, California.
Tom Sherman. Private collection. Syracuse, New York.
Michael Snow Fonds. Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives. Art Gallery of Ontario. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Hans Sohm Archive. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Stuttgart, Germany.
199 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Works Cited and Consulted
1971 Census of Canada, Catalog 92-705, Vol. 1-Part: 1 (Bulletin 1.1-5). Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1972.
Expo 70 Official Guide. Osaka: Shunichi Suzuki, 1970.
“Psychedelic Art.” LIFE Magazine, September 9, 1966.
“The Second Sexual Revolution.” Time Magazine, January 22, 1964.
Science Service, Inc. Atomic Bombing: How To Protect Yourself. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co.: 1950.
Adorno, Theodor W. The Stars Down to Earth (1951). New York: Routledge, 1994. ——. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1951). Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2006. ——. Negative Dialectics (1966). Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Bloomsbury, 1981. ——. Aesthetic Theory (1970). Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Alberro, Alexander. Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Allen, Gwen. Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
200 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Alter, Nora N. Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Althusser, Louis. The Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G.M. Goshgarian. New York: Verso, 2014.
Andriopoulos, Stefan. “Psychic Television.” Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005). ——. Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (2000). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Antin, David. “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium.” Video Art. Edited by Susan Delehanty. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1975.
Arthur, Paul. A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Asendorf, Christoph. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity. Translated by Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Ayson, Robert. Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as Social Science. New York: Frank Cass, 2004.
Badash, Lawrence. A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Bagnall, V. B. “Operation DEW Line.” Journal of the Franklin Institute 259, no. 6 (June 1955).
201 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Ball, Gordon. “Triptape: An Interview with Richard Aldcroft.” Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966/Summer 1967). ——. ’66 Frames. St. Paul, MN: Coffee House Press, 1999.
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202 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ——. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
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203 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Boulle, Pierre. Ears of the Jungle. Translated by Michael Dobry and Lynda Cole. New York: Vanguard, 1972.
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204 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Builder, Carl H. The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1989.
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205 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Castillo, Greg. Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
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206 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. ——. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
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207 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Detterer, Gabrielle, and Maurizio Nannucci, eds. Artist-Run Spaces: Nonprofit Collective Organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Zürich: JRP | Ringier, 2012.
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208 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Dunne, Matthew W. Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.
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209 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Elsaesser, Thomas. “The ‘Return’ of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century.” Critical Inquiry 39 (Winter 2013): 217-246.
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210 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. ——. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
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211 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. Studies in Hysteria (1895). Translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
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212 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Gavin, Francis J. Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.
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213 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Norton, 1948.
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214 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Hamilton, Shane, and Sarah Phillips. The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Products: A Brief History with Documents. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2014.
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215 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Heims, Steve Joshua. John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. ——. The Cybernetics Group: 1946-1953. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
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216 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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217 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Johnston, Adrian. Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
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218 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Kaplan, Edward. To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.
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219 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Kittler, Friedrich A. “Dracula’s Legacy” (1982). Literature, Media, Information Systems. Edited by John Johnston. New York: Routledge, 1997. ——. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1985). Translated by Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
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220 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Kuznick, Peter J., and James Gilbert, eds. Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001.
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221 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Langford, Martha, A.L. Rees, Amy Taubin, and Malcolm LeGrice. Michael Snow almost Cover to Cover. London: Black Dog, 2001.
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222 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Leonard, Barry. History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, Volume I (1945-1955) and Volume II (1956-1972). Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History, 2009.
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223 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 de Loppinot, Stéfani. La Région centrale de Michael Snow: Voyage dans la quatrième dimension. Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2010.
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224 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. ——. Software Takes Command. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
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225 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
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226 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. ——. “Brain Warfare: The Cover Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War.” Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011).
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227 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. “Paradigms of Jouissance.” lacanian ink 17 (Fall 2000): 8 – 47.
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228 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Neer, Robert M. Napalm: An American Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
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229 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Osterweil, Ara. Flesh Cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2014.
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230 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
Redmond, Kent C., and Thomas M. Smith. From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
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231 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety. Translated by Marion Faber, with Derek and Inge Jordan. Edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.
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232 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Rohde, Joy. Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Rose, Barbara. “Review: About 30 Works by Michael Snow.” New York Magazine, December 11, 1972.
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233 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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234 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. Early Work. Catalogue to the exhibition. New York: Max Hutchinson Gallery. ——. Recent Work. Catalogue to the exhibition. New York: Max Hutchinson Gallery. ——. Video Burn. Catalogue to the exhibition. San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute. ——. Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. ——. Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle. Edited by Kristine Stiles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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235 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Sharaf, Myron. Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
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236 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
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237 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Snow, Michael. “A Statement on ‘Wavelength’ for the Experimental Film Festival of Knokke-Le-Zoute.” Film Culture 46 (Autumn 1967 / October 1968): 1. ——. “Conversation with Michael Snow” by Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. Film Culture 46 (Autumn 1967 / October 1968): 3. ——. In conversation with Charlotte Townsend, “Michael Snow on La Région Centrale.” Film Culture 52 (Spring 1971). ——. Michael Snow/A Survey. Toronto: , 1971. ——. About 30 Works by Michael Snow. Catalogue to the exhibition. New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1972. ——. The Michael Snow Project: The Collected Writings of Michael Snow. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1994
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238 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Stern, Sheldon M. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory. Stanford, MA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
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239 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, 2 volumes (1977). Translated by Chris Turner, Stephen Conway, Erica Carter. Minneapolis, MD: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Tomas, David. Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
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240 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
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241 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Walley, Jonathan. “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film.” October 103 (Winter 2003): 15-30.
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242 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 ——. Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Second Edition (1954). New York: Da Capo Press, 2011. ——. God and Golem, Inc. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964.
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243 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Yanarella, Ernest J. The Missile Defense Controversy: Technology in Search of a Mission. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Yoon, Soyoung. “A Broken Line.” Millennium Film Journal 54 (Autumn 2011).
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Young, Robert A. The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.
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244 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Illustration Checklist
Strangeloves: From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War
Stanley Kubrick, dir. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964. Frame enlargement.
Camera Activating Machine as it appeared near Sept-Îles during production of La région centrale, September 1970. Courtesy of Pierre Abbeloos.
Canadian Forces Air Defense Radar Station Moisie as it appeared in February 1967. Canada Department of National Defense.
Bell Telephone Laboratories. The Arctic Eye That Never Sleeps, 1959. Magazine advertisement.
F.E. Swain. “Unit sphere showing various stabilization angles,” where O is “the origin and center of the sphere,” 1948. Figure A1 from F.E. Swain, “Formulas for Stabilization of Ship Antennas,” in Radar Scanners and Radomes, eds. W. M. Cady, M. B. Karelitz, and Louis A. Turner (New York: McGraw-Hill and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Defense Research Committee, Radiation Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1948), 464.
Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame enlargement. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame series. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
245 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame series. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame series. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame series. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Pierre Abbeloos and Michael Snow with the Camera Activating Machine, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, March 1971. Courtesy of Pierre Abbeloos.
Camera Activating Machine assembled circuit boards. Pierre Abbeloos, 1970. Courtesy of Pierre Abbeloos.
Camera Activating Machine assembled circuit boards. Pierre Abbeloos, 1970. Courtesy of Pierre Abbeloos.
Camera Activating Machine as it appeared on-site for production of La région centrale, near Sept-Îles, September 1970. Courtesy of Pierre Abbeloos.
Peter Kubelka and Giorgio Cavaglieri. The Invisible Cinema, 1970. Image courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
Science Service, Inc. Atomic Bombing: How To Protect Yourself, 1950.
Pierre Abbeloos and Joyce Wieland (kneeling with focus chart) with the Camera Activating Machine, near Sept-Îles, September 1970. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Michael Snow. Projection, 1970. Image courtesy of NSCAD University Permanent Art Collection and the artist.
246 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Michael Snow. De la, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1971.
Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame enlargement. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Michael Snow. La région centrale, 1971. Frame enlargement. Courtesy of Michael Snow.
Crest of Canadian Forces Radar Squadron 211. Si invisum non invisum: If it is an enemy, it must not go unobserved.
Meat System in Köln: Carolee Schneemann and the Electronic Activation Room
Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Carolee Schneemann. Köln notebook pages, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Carolee Schneemann. Interior Scroll—The Message, 1974. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and PPOW Gallery, New York.
Carolee Schneemann. Lateral Splay, 1963. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann.
Carolee Schneemann. Lateral Splay, 2012. Courtesy of Ian Douglas and Danspace Project.
247 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Carolee Schneemann. Lateral Splay, 2012. Courtesy of Ian Douglas and Danspace Project.
Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton. Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Wolf Vostell. Floor plan for Happening & Fluxus, 1970.
Carolee Schneemann. Köln notebook pages, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
248 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Carolee Schneemann. Köln notebook pages, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Crest of United States Navy (USN) Observation Squadron 67 (VO-67). The unit existed from February 1967 until July 1968, during which time it participated in Operation Igloo White in Southeast Asia.
“CHECO REPORT” on the inefficacy of Operation Igloo White, drafted in 1971. Declassified in 2006.
Wolf Vostell. Electronic dé-coll/age, Happening Room, 1968.
Wolf Vostell. Electronic dé-coll/age, Happening Room, 1968.
Donald A. Laird and anonymous female test subject as they appear in his article “Experiments in the Physiological Cost of Noise,” 1929.
Carolee Schneemann. Testing Energy, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann.
Carolee Schneemann. Study for Testing Energy, 1970. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann.
Tom Sherman and the Influencing Machines
Tom Sherman. Hyperventilation, 1970. Film still from Andrew Lugg. Trace, 1972.
249 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015 Tom Sherman in a ganzfeld action on the cover of Video By Artists, ed. Peggy Gale. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1976.
Richard Aldcroft in a ganzfeld action with his Infinity Machine on the cover of LIFE Magazine, September 9, 1966.
“Workers of the world, disperse.” The Whole Earth Catalog Supplement, 1971.
Tom Sherman with his Faraday Cage, 1973.
Tom Sherman. Hyperventilation (second iteration), 1971. Eastern Michigan University.
Hans Haacke. Condensation Cube, 1963-65.
Chris Burden. Velvet Water, 1974.
Tom Sherman. Breathing Apparatus and Text, 1974.
250 | Kenneth Allan White Jr | Libidinal Engineers | Stanford University Department of Art & Art History | June 2015